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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without goods?

No, into bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

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

Today, my guest is Jamaica Kincaid, and the book is called See Now Then.

And as we talk, I think you'll come to see more and more deeply into the title.

To begin with, I want to say that Jamaica Kincaid loves to find the way to make a book, an event, something new, something fresh, something dangerous and brave.

My deepest memory of Jamaica, I attended a lecture that she gave on Thomas Jefferson, and there was some tittering in the audience, there were unusual phrases, and Jamaica looked

up and said, yes, laugh.

You Americans love to laugh. It is one of the things that you do. You laugh. You Americans love to laugh. It is one of the things that you do. You laugh. It's one of the things that you like best to do. And everyone in the room was completely shaken, didn't know how to respond. Would they laugh, would they leave, would they applaud, would

they become enraptured? Well, they did all those things and you continued to give your lecture.

Now, that bravery is true of this book as well.

The first thing that people will not know, they will not know how to respond.

Is it a novel? Is it biography? Are you telling scandalous secrets about yourself and others that you know?

And it goes so deeply.

And it's not any one thing.

It's four, five, six, eight, twenty things.

And there's no one answer to those questions.

...