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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblad, and today I'm thrilled to have as my guest, Joy Williams,

whose new novel, The Quick and the Dead, has just been published by Alfred A. Knoff.

She's the author of three previous novels.

The first was State of Grace, The Changeling, Breaking and Entering,

and Two Books of Short Stories, Taking Care and Escapes.

And she's really one of the writers, you know, to wait 10 years for a Joy Williams book is worth the wait, but I would like one every week almost.

Well, probably I wouldn't survive the onslaught, but the degree of holiness and terror, the beauty, the poetry, the strangeness of her work consistently dazzles me.

And it's in her novels where, because she's not working within the constrictions of what she considers to be a perfect form,

that she tends to blow all of the works and these books, these novels, are some of the strangest things that you'll ever find anywhere, it seems to me.

Now, this book, The Quick and the Dead,

imagines a space or says that the place we live

is a place in which the living are not dying and the dead are

returning in essence.

And so that there is a loss of the gradation between life and death.

What brought you to that particular terrain?

Well, there are two pillars to the book that I realized after I had finished it,

...