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 Silverblad, and this is bookworm. I'm here this week

with Jay Perini, the author of The Last Station, a novel of Tolstoy's last year, recently published

to extravagantly enthusiastic reviews by Henry Holt. Now, I wanted to ask, before I tackle how, I suppose it would be a poet who dares to do Tolstoy

in a novel, but I wanted to ask how you manage to get what to me is one of the most

beautiful, congenial tones in all of literature, which

is the tone of translations by Constance Garnett or by Elmer Moore into this book.

It's so, such a wonderful, modulated version of the 19th century novel in its tone that I was sitting feeling totally comforted by it.

Well, I'm a very relaxed guy.

I mean, I was just thinking today, as I was sitting in a restaurant here in Los Angeles having lunch, and people look so nervous, running around, running around.

There were yuppies everywhere.

And I came especially from, I could live in a farm in Vermont.

And this is only my second brief trip to L.A., and I wanted to see yuppies.

And I looked around, and I saw them.

And it was just so amazing.

They had these, you know, shirts on, wild shirts, and they had

their babies in these prego carriages. And I looked through the fence. I was eating at the Rose

Cafe. And I looked through the fence, and there were people in Mercedes-Benz, sports cars. It was

everything I thought, you know, this is what it should be, but I noticed everybody was nervous.

...