You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome today to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Josephine Hart, the author of Damage and, more recently, Sin.

Both of them published originally by Knopf.

Damage is now in an edition from Ivy Books in paperback.

And I guess I thought I'd begin by discussing, you know, Michiko Kakatani in the New York Times

noticed, as have others, the similarities of these books to classical tragedy.

Had you thought about them in that way?

Well, I certainly thought damage and also sin were tragedies when I was writing them,

which is one of the reasons it has astonished me that they have been successful because I think they're very dark.

I think they're also very formal and classical tragedy is very formal and very controlled.

And that is certainly very unfashionable.

So that, yes, I was aware of what I was doing.

And I was aware Ted Hughes, the Port Laureate in England, describes the Greek classics as psychic missiles sent out into the world.

And in a sense, that that is what I believe a certain kind of very formalized tragedy is.

I was watching Medea a little while ago,

and 2,000 years later, you completely connect to it.

So they work on a psychological level that is very controlled.

It's a very interesting tension.

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