Hearby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

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, Joshua Cohn.

I had wanted to talk about this book, the Book of Numbers.

As many of you know, I chose the book as one of my five

favorite books of the year, and now the book is available as a random house paperback,

and I reread it for this occasion. I was very surprised and pleased when reading this book for a second time to discover

that it's the work of someone who really loves novels, so that although the author is

Josh Cohen, who's writing about a character named Josh Cohen,

who is writing about an inventor of the Internet named Josh Cohen, it's not that kind of book at all.

It really isn't.

Can you tell me about the state of your belief in novels?

The state of my belief in novels.

...