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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 welcome to Bookworm.

I am very happy to have today with me in the studio, Marilynne Robinson, whose new book, Home, has been published by Ferris Strauss and Giroux.

It is a side-by-side book with her former book, Gilead, which was also published by Farris

Strauss and won the Pulitzer Prize.

She has two books of essays,

The Death of Adam and Mother Country,

and a, well, you know, a very famous first novel

that made everyone who had read it

weighed eagerly for the, what, 20 years between it, housekeeping, and Gilead, the second novel,

and now we have the third home.

Tell me, you know, when we spoke last, what was on the horizon for you as a writer, was a nonfiction book. And suddenly,

you know, I'd been keeping track. You'd been traveling around the country, giving readings,

giving talks. And suddenly, the announcement came that this book would come out.

And it seems to me, you know, in that kind of loose and literary way of saying things,

that this book must have tumbled out of you.

I think that that's a fair characterization of it.

Actually, I was working on a nonfiction book, and I just kept thinking about these,

...