Hereby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Larissa McFarker.

She is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and she has just published her first book.

It's a remarkable book.

It's called Strangers Drowning.

Its subtitle is, Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the overpowering urge to help.

In the course of reading it, I discovered that I was very interested.

You know, usually I'm talking to you about poetry and novels.

I regard poets as altruists almost automatically because of the difficulty of living in the world and practicing that art form.

Novelists not as frequently, they have ambitions, but poets are pure.

And I read your book, Larissa, and discovered that things had happened to altruism since I last looked.

Tell me what altruism is today.

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