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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Zintuberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

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

Today I'm very pleased to have us my guest, Lawrence Weaschler, Ren Weishler.

He's the author most recently of Uncanny Valley, Adventures in the Narrative.

And I wanted to begin immediately by asking you, what is narrative nonfiction?

It's funny.

Before we started, we were talking about people calling it creative nonfiction, literary

nonfiction.

Actually, the term I prefer is writerly nonfiction.

It's non-fictive writing, which is to say it's about it is precisely not fiction.

It is not made up.

It is about the world.

It is about actual things in the world. But it is done with writing as if the reading mattered. And it expects reading as of the writing mattered. I teach a course at NYU called the fiction of nonfiction. And in that course, I am interested precisely in all the

fictive elements of this kind of writing, which is to say things like structure, form,

voice, freedom, irony, all the kinds of things that you usually see in fiction. Rhapsody is another one of them.

And I want, it's, by the way, a funny class because it's offered half, it's a graduate course,

...