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Boots!

Where would we be without boos? Where would we be without good timber?

Even the thought of it so absurd?

Where would we be without books

where would we be without books

where would we be

where would we be without good

no interverg

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'm very pleased to have, as my guest, Joseph McElroy, he's one of my favorite writers. You'd hardly use a word as naive as favorite with a writer like Joseph McElroy, but I like to. I like to because these books move and

excite and stimulate me in ways that most writers don't even begin to know how to move or locate feeling

and emotional meeting places. This new book is called Night's Soul. It concludes with a story

that I think is so beautiful that you read it practically on tiptoe because you're in

a room with a sleeping baby, the baby's father, hearing a sound, approaching the baby, and the mother

sleeping. You read the story slowly because you don't want any of your own breaths to wake up these characters.

That's how deep and intimate the writing goes so that you're participating in a waking dream of what it's like to be with a family in the darkness

of a room. And it's so moving. Joe, how did this come about? I'm not sure how it came about.

I think it came about partly from being a father and realizing that it isn't

simply a matter of engendering and it isn't simply a matter of protecting. It's a matter of knowing.

...