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.

Hi, this is Michael Soferblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. I'm really happy to be

here today with Isabella Allende, the author most recently of the stories of Eva Luna, which is in

certain ways a continuation of the themes and concerns in her previous novel, Eva Luna, author

too of the House of the Spirits and of Love and Shadows.

I can't really think of another book like this,

a book written ostensibly by the character created in the previous novel.

What led to it?

Pure necessity. I had recently met a Gringo lawyer, moved to this country.

I didn't have a room of my own. No time, space, peace of mind for a novel. And I can't stop writing. It's an organic necessity. So I thought, well,

maybe this is the time to try this very hard genre of short novels. Hard, especially for

people of Spanish descent as I am, because we don't have a very long tradition in short stories.

We tend to write novels.

Overdone, heavy baroque novels.

And short stories is such a different genre.

I mean, it's more important what you leave out than what you really write.

And so I decided that it was a good time for that

because the only advantage of short stories

is that you need less continuous periods of time.

...