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

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Karen Joy Fowler, whose new book, the Jane Austen

Book Club, is recently published by Putnam.

It's a Marion Wood book. This book is an account, as would be

inevitably the case, of the six evenings that the six members of a book club spend with Jane Austen's

six novels. And in the course of it, what we find is that what happens at book club meetings

is that people tell stories to one another.

They reveal themselves, and this novelist, Karen Joy Fowler,

has taken the occasion of stitching together her characters out of the meetings of this book club.

And in the course of it, one of them tells a short story, essentially, that fascinates me.

She talks about how her mother dealt with the fact that she was not of the temperament to give children's birthday parties.

Could you tell about this story, first of all?

I would be happy to.

First of all, it comes out of the chapter which involves the meeting on Mansfield Park.

And I was trying to do a couple of things.

I wanted a character.

The character that that section of my book is focused on is a young woman named Prudy who teaches French at the high school.

...