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 Silverblot, and this is Bookworm.

I'm here in New York City attending the Penn World Festival of International Voices,

and I'm very pleased to have, as my guest today, Horacio Castellanos-Moya.

His novel, Senselessness, is the first novel of his to be published in English.

His publisher is New Directions.

I'm very pleased as well to be talking to the author of a book published

by New Directions because from their inception to the present, they have always been a publisher

where you can trust their books. They published the first things in English of Seybalt.

They published the first things in English of Roberto Bolognao.

And this wonderful, it's a legacy.

It goes all the way back to Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

This is a true American publisher of an avant-garde, and they have never wavered.

So you're very lucky, Orasio, to have a publisher of the sort to bring your book into English.

I wanted to ask you,

it's very hard to define the tone here of senselessness

because it is both satirical and anguished at the same time.

Can you describe it?

...