You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Bookworm, and I'm Michael Silverblatt, and we're here in the

studio today talking to Lynn Sharon Schwartz, whose book Leaving Brooklyn has been published by

Houten Mifflin. Also with us is Koki Iwamoto, the owner of the well-beloved Los Angeles

bookstore Chatterdons, and we'll be talking with him about

independent bookstore owning in a city like Los Angeles. Lynn Sharon Schwartz is the author

of six books. Probably the most well-known of them is the very brilliant disturbances in the field,

a book which I at first pushed from me feeling too naturalistic,

but then as I became engrossed in its dailiness and in its passions,

I found myself reading it with an attention that I just hadn't

given any other book I felt before. I felt it opened a new area of reading for me, a reading

that was more sympathetic to people than to language or to form. In leaving Brooklyn, in Sharon Schwartz's new book,

there's a kind of writing in which form very much matches style and content. How long did this take

you to write? This is a novella, really. Yes, it's a very short novel or novella. It was, I hesitate to say this, but it was very easy to write.

It wrote itself once I began.

It took me a year. It was from one August to another, I think,

1987 to 88. And it was an easy book.

Most writers don't ever admit that.

This was. When you started it,

...