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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm excited to have as my guest, Joshua Cohen, who is, well, it's quite extraordinary. He is now 31. He's been

publishing novels since he was 23, novels and books of short stories. Gradually, he's

been inching his way into consciousness. He's now the book reviewer for Harper's Magazine, and he has written a music novel, a alphabet

book based on the Hebrew alphabet, a book in which a boy 10 years old is blown by a suicide bomber into a heaven not his own, where

he's learning the rules of the afterlife in a different culture.

A novel, Wits About the Last Jew in the World, and now four new messages, which is published by

Grey Wolf Press, which is a collection of four novellas. If you haven't heard of him yet,

you'll be hearing of him. And I wanted to begin by asking, because I think you are some

kind of graphomaniac. What is a day's good writing like, and what is a good day's writing like?

I write every day, and every day is not a good day.

So I'm not really sure that I could quantify it solar or lunar by any of the calendars.

I think that just the sheer amount of pages and the sheer number of books are really attributable to the fact that i i i conceive of all of them in the most abstract terms as the same book three of those books sort of fell off one another um heaven of others was sort of the gallbladder of vitz.

Schneiderman would be, I don't know, maybe the kidneys of viz as well.

Four new messages began as a bookum writing now.

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