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.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Karen Elizabeth Gordon.

She is the author of some of the oddest and most peculiar and strange books on the face of the earth.

And the most recent one is called torn wings and faux pas,

or torn wings and faux pa.

But we wanted you to hear the paw in faux paul.

It's published by Pantheon.

Recently published as well is Paris out of hand,

a bizarre guidebook to an imaginary Paris

with more hotels than Joseph Cornell ever fit into a Cornell box

published by Chronicle Books.

There is the one overtly fictional work called The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales.

It was published by Donkey Archive Press.

She is the author as well of the disheveled dictionary, the new well-tempered sentence,

and the ravenous muse and the deluxe transitive vampire.

And that is the works.

Now, these books, as I say, are very odd.

...