Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good to bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Solverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Okay, so I'm in a bookstore. Where else? And I see on the shelf, huh, this is how you lose her.

One of my favorite books, a book that's been on bookworm, but it doesn't look like the book I read.

And it's a deluxe boxed illustrated edition of Juno Diaz's book.

And the illustrations are by the magnificent Jaime Hernandez,

who, like Juno, has a sensitivity to the feelings and anger of women like very few I've ever seen.

And so I thought, wow, what a marriage.

I didn't wait for them to send me the thing.

I bought it.

I bought it right away and took it home.

And, you know, it's become one of my favorite things since.

We've got both Juno here and Jaime.

Jaime, how did this happen?

On my end, I was contacted by the book company to do this.

They told me that since I had already illustrated some of these stories in the New Yorker years back,

they thought, why not do a whole book of the same artist, I guess, you know.

And I jumped on it right away.

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