Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tenderberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblad. Welcome to Bookworm. You know, I just have been spending time with this book. It's called Men and Apparitions. I think it's absolutely delectable.

My favorite book, previous to this one, Lynn Tillman, my favorite one was American genius

a comedy. And in that book, the narrator is in what might be an insane asylum or a literary colony.

But however this is, she's trapped.

In this book, we're also trapped within the mind of a very unusual man.

His name is Zeke.

His name is Ezekiel Hooper Stark.

He's a cultural anthropologist,

he's an ethnographer, he's unquestionably male,

and as an ethnographer,

he's in some sense studying what it means to be a male,

and everything that enters his mind, he intellectualizes.

And as a result, it becomes a hilarious book.

I thought of his relation to life as being something like Sylvester's relation to Tweedy Burr.

Oh my God.

...