You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today, as it was last week, is Gordon Lish, the author most recently of ZimZum,

published by Pantheon.

He is the editor of Much, for lack of a better word, experimental American fiction, and an anthologist and teacher as well.

I thought that I would go back to what was one of the first gestures of yours that I noticed.

If I remember correctly, one of your stories was published in Esquire as if it were a found

Salinger story.

This struck me, you know, of course, I bought the issue of Esquire with the enthusiasm one

feels for, you know, not necessarily for Salinger, but the projection, the desire to know what it would be like to know what Salinger is writing now.

Why this gesture?

Your act in acquiring that issue of Esquire represents, in fact, the object of my exertion.

Selling magazines?

Selling the magazine.

I had been invited by the then editor of the magazine to do what we could to enlarge

the newsstand sales of Esquire and hopes of keeping the magazine on any newsstand anywhere

for another set of issues in that we were in at the time, rather severe difficulties.

The rest of your observation really, in fact, invokes for me the problem I set myself.

What would Salinger sound like now if Salinger were to write?

...