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 very happy to have as my guest, Marion Wiggins, whose new novel, The Shadowcatcher,

has just been published by Simon & Schuster.

She's been on the show before.

We've discussed evidence of things unseen,

her last novel, and John Dollar.

And we're about to launch on a discussion

of whether the term a novel is satisfactory

for this book,

which combines biography, memoir, essays, photographs,

and it breaks up the form. Not only does it break up the form, in this book, it turns out

that Marion Wiggins has published a book called, of all things, The Shadowcatcher,

that she is about to talk to movie people about its subject, the life of Edward Curtis, the Western photographer,

to tell the movie people, in that Curtis is not what they think he is,

not the red-haired hero who took photos of a vanishing race, but a manipulator of truth, an absentee father.

And so the book begins with the announcements that the things that give its subject currency are not to be trusted, and that the manipulation of truth and the disappointment when

truth is discovered is part of the subject of this novel.

...