I'm Bill Moyers. It's good to have your ear.

The creator of Gilead, Home and Lila, says democracy is still a work in progress.

I do think that people really are too splendid to be contained in 70 years of life, if they are lucky, you know, and that,

you know, to try to trim us down in our own understanding, to make us seem to make sense

in reality, when obviously we don't. There's something very excessive about human beings.

They are brilliant beyond any imaginable use, you know.

And, I mean, who knows if we live another hundred years, what we will have done?

If we just can, you know, refrain from violence a little bit, it's amazing.

Thanks for joining us.

Rarely has a novel been so universally acclaimed as Marilyn Robertson's Lila. An unflinching book, says the New Yorker.

An exquisite novel of spiritual redemption and love reports the Washington Post.

And that's just for starters, in this latest of her books

examining the lives of a minister, his wife, their son, and neighbors in a fictional town in

Iowa. The first, Gilead, won Marilyn Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize. Home followed, and now Lila,

nominated just this week for the National Book Award, filled,

as one reviewer wrote, with quiet epiphanes. Exactly what we've come to expect from

Marilyn Robertson. She's been described as a woman who speaks in sentences that accumulate

into polished paragraphs with a mind that skips the stones of a question across its ample surface.

And, of course, that's how she writes, including her nonfiction work.

In fact, it wasn't her gifts as a novelist that first caught my attention.

It was her essays in such collections as The Death of Adam, Absence of mind, and when I was a child, I read

books.

...