Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

From KCRW, Santa Monica,

I'm Michael Silverblatt,

and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm really delighted

to have Elena Maria Viramantes.

Her new novel is

Their Dogs Came With Them.

It's published by Atria Books. She's the author as well of Under the Feet of Jesus and a collection of stories called The Moths. And this is one of those rare occasions where I read a book. I felt that I knew this writer very well. We'd spoken before on Bookworm,

and along came a book 12 years after her last one

that really is what is in the purest form, a breakthrough book.

Nowadays, they talk about a breakthrough book,

and what they mean is it's a bestseller.

But when the term was invented, it referred to a writer who really had broken through to

a new level of treating her material and her themes and found a level of expressiveness and structure that brought her work to

a culmination.

And that's what we have in their dogs came with them.

It's the result of 12 years of work.

...