Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we mean without books?

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

Today, I'm talking to Maggie Nelson, a poet, a cultural theorist, a memoirist about her new book.

She calls it a reckoning.

It's called the Art of Cruelty.

Maggie, tell me how cruelty became subject to your reckoning.

Well, this book, I think, had three routes that I could very easily name.

The first was a long-standing interest in a certain strain of avant-garde art that I taught and read about and seen

and was, you know, attracted to and upset by that seemed to have shock and violence at its core.

That's a more scholarly interest.

The more personal side had been recently, not so recently, but finishing two books about my aunt's murder,

which were one called Jane and one called the Red Parts.

And because I teach and in art, I kind of, while writing those two books about and trying to struggle with issues about how to represent violence in my own writing, real-life violence, I found myself stockpiling, clippings and, you know, notes about art and literature that was helping me think through that problem.

So by the time I finished those books, I had a very high pile of that material.

And then lastly, I guess it was written or really began and then followed through to the end.

It was began around the Abu Ghraib scandal during the Bush years, and it just seemed W. Bush years, and it just seemed, it just seemed kind of crushing around these issues about representations of violence. And I wasn't prepared to write a book about necessarily a political book,

but I think I was trying through the art and literature that I write about

...