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 my guest is Kate Wheeler.

Her first book of stories was called Not Where I Started from.

It's available in a mariner edition from Houghton Mifflin.

And she was chosen one of the grant young American novelist's most bearing watching.

Now her first novel, When Mountains Walked, has been published by Houghton Mifflin,

and I wanted to begin, I think, a good way to get into a conversation about this book and how it feels to read would be to mention that it has, in the course of its authors, closing note, one of the most peculiar things I think I've seen ever. There's the sentence, what may seem melodramatic in this book is intended to be so.

And it sounds like the sentence appears as a result of some kind of arm wrestle.

Can you say?

Well, I think I'm thinking, I was thinking very fictionally when I wrote this and I also wanted not to be sort of seen as the author.

And, you know, like I don't like people to try to get at me through the book somehow.

And that had happened quite a bit.

A lot of people who met me after reading my short stories said, how many of these things did you

really do? And I wanted them to just read the book and read the book as a book. And so I felt

kind of troubled by that aspect of it. Also, there more happens in this book than usually

happens to people, you know, and there's a, the plot of a Hindi movie

secreted in there, which I don't think of as being a very realistic way of portraying human nature,

...