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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

This is a show with Jay Perini.

Jay Perini has written many books, but I think this is the most extraordinary.

I got a call from my friend Ed Beattie, telling me that I ought to read Jay Perini's new book

called Borges and Me, An Encounter. It's published by Doubleday.

And from the moment I began within 20 pages, I couldn't stop reading.

You might say, yeah, yeah, I'll just bet a literary book about Borges.

No.

Jay Perini had gone to Scotland

to escape the draft

during the war in Vietnam.

He was a graduate student there,

a poet named Alistair Reed, who frequently wrote essays for the New Yorker as well, was his mentor. Alistair Reed was translating the poetry of Orchegui

Borges, together with Borges.

Reed had a family crisis, had to go away, and left Jay Perini, who had never really heard of or read Borges

...