Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

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

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

Today I'm very happy to have as my guest, Joshua Ferris, whose new book, The Unnamed

has just been published by Little Brown, the Reagan-Arthur imprint.

And his first book, Then We Came to the End, was published in 2007.

It's very interesting to me because when I read the first book only recently, it seemed to me that

this comedy that people have recognized has as a forebear catch-22 is a sort of death-haunted

book and rather frightening in the way that there seemed to be

trapped doors between the surface of the novel and the problems the characters have to solve.

They're creative people in an advertising agency, but eventually

they're faced with a question about what's funny and is everything funny when they're asked

to think of an advertisement that might make someone with breast cancer smile or

even laugh.

And I thought that this, among other things, was the subject of them.

We came to the end, and I thought the end was death, and I thought the book was a celebration of the

idiocies we find to do every day to keep ourselves entertained while the more horrible

things lurk in the background.

The unnamed has now appeared, and it engages even more directly with disease and death,

...