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.

This is the second part of a two-part interview with Hubert Selby Jr.

Last week we talked about his explosive first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn,

and today we're going to continue with the six books that so far comprise the rest of his career.

The last exit to Brooklyn came out, and as I remember, it wasn't very long after before a section of the room appeared in the Evergreen Review.

It was a rape by two policemen of a woman that they find. The section was possibly more disturbing than anything in Last Exit because perhaps it carried on what

happened at the end of last exit where the state in the form of the corporation is carrying on against the workers.

Here we have the police against a woman.

The novel was to be narrated by an innocent man who was jailed for that rape,

aware that the police had committed it.

It took six years before the book finally came out. And I'm curious

because in every way, last exit is a wide canvas, a social novel with a vast number of

characters. The room is an interior novel, I suppose the inspiration for this kind of book is Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. The book that occurs entirely within the head of the possibly mad, certainly obsessive narrator.

Six years.

What was happening?

A lot of self-destruction primarily.

I guess I just was overwhelmed by the response to last exit,

and I now had enough money to indulge myself to the point of death.

...