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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Heidi Julevitz.

She's the author of The Mineral Palace.

It's the first novel.

It comes from Putnam, and I'm very delighted to talk to her,

because this book impressed me for two reasons, its own merits,

and the fact that its editor, Faith Sale, died in the past year.

It was the last book she took on to edit, and she is a woman who had, among other things, copy-edited Gravity's Rainbow, worked as an editor with Joseph

Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthamy, all kinds of interesting writers, John Barth,

and then developed her own small stable of writers, including Alice Hoffman, Amy Tan, people who, mostly women writers,

who she really brought into their own. And Heidi Julevitz, my guest, is the last of a

distinguished line of writers who had the opportunity to work with Faith Sale at Putnam.

I wanted to ask you to begin with, just to ease our way in here.

This is, by anyone's account, a very dark book, as they say, begins dark and gets darker.

Was there ever a moment when Faith tried to get you to bring the book more happily to a different place?

Actually, no. She really never tried to get me to do anything, which I think is what made her such a remarkable editor, as well as a remarkable person. She would just,

she was, she was fairly sick when we were really doing the hardcore editing. Unfortunately,

...