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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, it's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

This week I have the thrill, the honor, the joy of having a cross from me, Leslie Marmon Selko.

Her new book is the Turquoise Ledge, published by Viking.

It's a memoir that draws on her Native American traditions of storytelling

and close connection to the natural world. Well, you know, probably one of your favorite books,

too, is her first novel ceremony, one of the darkest books, Omanac of the Dead. Well,

a very wonderful novel that came out.

But it's ten years ago, Gardens and the Dunes, and now the Turquoise Ledge.

I'm saying this because in the ten years, I feel that Leslie Marmon Silco has learned to do something to put a spell on a book, on a project.

And as I was reading the turquoise ledge, as I read about birds in the southwestern desert,

two birds lit on the ledge outside my window.

As I was thinking about diabetes, an unusual cure for diabetes synthesized from the poison of hila monsters, appeared in the book.

I was eating with a friend who reads, but not all that much, who opened it to a paragraph,

looked and said, oh, she's a good writer.

And then half a second later, as if he'd been corrected by his conscience, he said,

she's a great writer, and she is, too long absent, who has figured out how to make a book address your situation, I believe, honestly,

...