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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.

I'm very happy to have, as my guest today, Joyce Carol Oates, a longtime friend and atime friend of Bookworm, and she has edited a book

called Prison Noir. It's part of the series from Akashik. There are more than 60 volumes now.

There's New Jersey Noir, which she also edited.

Noir is eating the world.

I was once very defensive about noir because I thought, well, I wanted people to be reading serious fiction,

but I look and I see Boston Noir and Bronx Noir and Brooklyn Noir and every noir imaginable

Baghdad Noir, Bogota Noir, Jerusalem Noir, extraordinary.

So let's begin.

You have a very particular definition of noir that I think is brilliant and cuts right through the red tape.

Noir is about betrayal.

Yes, I think that's so true, and it's certainly borne out with most of the stories in prison noir.

It's especially borne out in prison noir because betrayal has often put these narrators where they are.

Yes, I was, when I assembled the stories, I had read, quote, very many stories, and what

seemed to link them was a sense of profound shock, almost an ontological or metaphysical shock,

...