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.

Hi, this is Michael Sulfurblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is James McCourt, whose most recent book, called Time Remaining, is recently

published by Alfred A. Knopf.

He's the author as well of Kay Wayfaring in Avenged and Mardugorgias, a novel that was a striking entrance onto the

literary scene when it first appeared in the New American Review, and everyone from its editor

Ted Salataroff to Susan Sontag held it. It arrived the way the diva Mardegorges arrived to a welcoming cult,

and his fiction always long-awaited, and usually 10 years between books, is the subject of a

cult as well. I thought I'd start by asking,

this book, time remaining,

seems the most august,

the most philosophical,

the least gadflyish of the books.

Why is that?

I'm older.

It's a book about the dead who were a lot of them, well, all of the people in the book, were

on the line for Mardu and aware of the K-Wafering universe.

And so this is their wake.

This book is their wake.

...