Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is bookworm.

This is a terrifically exciting show for me.

Because Jeanette Winterson, my guest is a guest that I love sitting across from, and she's written a book

that I loved reading. The book is called Frankestine, and there is a famous night in literary history

by Lake Geneva, where a bunch of writers and a doctor and feminists joined together where

Byron was there, who in this book, in the present, will appear as a character named Ron Lord.

That's right.

We're going to travel through time from that night when they decided to scare each other

by writing stories.

And Mary Shelley was there and she is the author of Frankenstein, the daughter of Mary

Wollstonecroft, the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women, which is still a great book,

and the wife of Percy Bish Shelley.

I think I put that in the right order

because in the past,

...