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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

Go to 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 I have the pleasure of introducing to you a writer that I've been reading for some

time and been very interested in.

He is very exciting. He's my kind of writer.

He has two books that have come out simultaneously a novel called The Curfew,

which has been published by Vintage,

another which is an omnibus of his stories and poems and novellas called The Village on Horseback.

It's prose and verse from 2003 to 2008, and it's published by Milkweed Editions.

They're both in paperback so they can be immediately acquired. There was a very charming capsule review in the New Yorker of the novel The Curfew,

and I thought I'd read it to you.

Ball's fiction lies at some oscillating coordinate between Kafka and Calvino,

swift, intense fables composed of equal parts wonder and dread.

In previous books, the author has seemed giddy with his powers of invention as his

heroes scramble through labyrinths. His new novel is sparser, more intimate, almost claustrophobic. A former violinist turned epitaphoress, and his mute, eight-year-old daughter, lead a studdedly pedestrian existence in a police state. All artistic performances are banned, and it is not uncommon to see a body thrown off a bridge one night the father breaks curfew to meet with members of the resistance leaving his daughter in the care of a puppeteer with whom she stages an illegal play

what sounds precious in summary astonishes on the page, the reader is

...