L.A. has the largest jail system in the country.

You got people that been in jail just like one time and their life can't get nothing because of whatever mistake they made.

I stole some ground turkey because I wanted to feed my family. We was hungry.

Off the Block. Stories tracing the path from city block to cell block and back.

Find it now at kCRW.com or subscribe on iTunes.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots! Welcome to are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots.

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No to the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books? From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt,

and welcome to Bookworm. Today, my guest is Marissa Silver. Her new novel from Blue Rider

Press is called Little Nothing.

And it's a wild book.

It took me some time to stop being astounded by it and to start wondering what it was and what it meant and how it works.

We've got a woman named Pavla, which means little. She's a dwarf.

She's a girl in a fairy tale, and we're tramping through the world of possibilities, meaning, and lack of meaning that fairy tales offer.

The book goes way beyond the realm that you expect, you know.

In fairy tales, like in biblical stories, barren women are given children. But in Marissa Silver's Little Nothing,

the barren woman given a child after many, many years, suffers a horrible and painful and

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