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, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

My guest is Joy Williams, the author most recently of the book of short stories, escapes,

recently published in paperback by Vintage.

She's the author as well of the novel Breaking and Entering,

the novel State of Grace, the Book of Short Stories, Taking Care,

and a novel no longer in print called The Changeling. She's one of my favorite writers,

and it's a pleasure to have her here. You mentioned in an afterward, quoting Nadine Gordimer,

that fiction, good fiction, burns a hole into the page,

and your comment was that, as far as you were concerned, that hole was W-H-O-L-E, what is a fictional whole?

Oh, what a well-phrased question.

Well, I think one of the reasons I'm so interested in the short story as a form is because I think you can create a whole and something, an experience that you perhaps don't recognize as much as enter into,

enter into a total experience.

And that's what I tried to do in my stories, and I think that that's what I appreciate in the short story writers that I most admire.

It's overwhelming. It's, it's, it admire, it's overwhelming.

It's, it's, it's, it's, um, can often be frightening and it's, uh, it's necessary,

even though you, uh, go in not knowing what, uh, what is necessary.

What's always interested me is that in this contradistinction to one of the writers that I know

you most admire Malcolm Lowry, whose works are whole by being dense and fibrous and

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