Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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, my honored guest is Laurie Moore.

Her book of short stories, Bark from Knopf is the occasion, and I'm fascinated by this book for many reasons, first of which is that these stories seem to be written the way poetry gets written. You know, some poets at the bottom of a poem

will say after Mandelstam or after Robert Frost. The poem has been inspired by another poet. In this book, Barque, there's one that says

after Vienne, and I know that that's Vladimir Nabokov, and there's another called Wings,

which is after H.J., Henry James, Wings of the Dove, that seems like a brand new thing.

Well, I think those are the only two stories that bounce off of other literary sources.

The Nabokov, it was some kind of referential echo that was born in my brain after reading signs and symbols,

a story by Nabokov about two years ago. And I sat down and I literally followed the story pretty much.

And I thought, what if you did a parallel narrative? Now, I didn't know whether this was permissible or not, and maybe it's still not.

But I did it because, as with all great literature, when you go back to it, you discover different things.

The emphasis in your reading are different.

And I suddenly became very interested in that son. I became

interested in the nature of the relationship in the Nabokov. What would happen if these characters

actually weren't like that, didn't have that solid marriage? And what if they weren't immigrants

...