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.

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

Today, I'm lucky to have as my guest, Lewis Hyde, whose very first book, The Gift, was published 25 years ago.

This is its 25th anniversary, and it's been brought back into paperback by vintage.

It's the gift, creativity, and the artist in the modern world.

And, you know, while reading this book, it's as if I've relived a kind of quest or odyssey

in which, you know, when you're young, you're wondering about how if you care about literature

and the arts or even have the daring to want to be a member of that

community, you wonder how you'll be able to live in the world and fear that you won't be able to,

and grow angry at the world for not providing the opportunities you need to live in it or not being the kind of world

that welcomes you with open arms and tells you how to prosper. And this book is a lively and

real and undaumatic, philosophical consideration of what it means to live in a world

that does not perhaps now have a home for you, but once had certain cultures whose metaphors

of gift exchange and gift giving were once the metaphors for a world an artist could live in.

Now, you start in a sense with a kind of free association or a pun that this gift that was given by early cultures or gifts that turn

up in folk tales and fairy tales are in their way similar to the gift that an artist has, when

they say of him, he's a very gifted man.

I suppose one simple definition of a gift is it's a thing you cannot get by your own willpower

...