Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

Today my guest is Mario Vargasiosa, whose most recent book is The Bad Girl from Faris

Strauss and Cheru.

His earlier novel, The Feast of the Goat, is available in paperback from Piccador.

Today, taping at the Museum of Television and Radio in Midtown Manhattan,

I am here to talk with Maria Bargasiosa about what I call after the boom. We had an extraordinary

period in which the literature of Latin and South America entered the world stage.

Some of it caused by the fact that books that had previously been published in one country only

were published in Spain and then available throughout South America, creating the consciousness of a continent.

Isabella Yende has told me that hers was the first generation that grew up reading the literature of the continent.

And it altered there was a kind of vast shift of consciousness, probably astonishing as writers realized that they had had similar

experiences in their formative consciousness, in their relation to culture and power.

I mean, what an incredible source of collective consciousness.

The sense now is that writing has gone back to a nascent stage, and I wondered how that happened.

Well, I think what has happened is that in the, let's say, in the 60s and the 70s, the world, at least an important part of the world,

discovered Latin American literature, discovered that Latin America didn't produce only dictators

and terrorism and civil wars, but also very interesting literary books, poems, short stories,

novels. And this was a discovery that was, of course, very, very important for Latin America

...