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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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm. This is Michael Silverblatt. Today is a very special day.

This is a show about Mark Twain. It's a celebration of a complete set of Twain that has been put out by the Oxford University Press.

What a set.

It's 29 volumes, each of which has an introduction by a literary writer and an afterward by a scholar.

Among those people celebrating Twain, our EL Doctor O on Tom Sawyer, Gorg Vidal on following the equator,

the anti-imperialism essays, the man that corrupted Hadleyburg is corrupted by Cynthia Ozick.

We've got all sorts, Ms. Manners writes about the court life of the medieval romances.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has Tony Morrison.

And we've got Leslie Fiedler on the pornographic twain.

We've got Charles Johnson on What is Man.

It's really an enormous occasion for American writers and critics to comment on the complete

Twain volume by volume.

I've got here with me in the studio, the editor of the set, Shelley Fisher-Fishkin.

I've got on the phone, Leslie Fiedler, a beloved teacher from my past at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

His most recent book is The Tyranny of the Normal from Godine. Also with us is Charles Johnson, the author of the National Book Award-winning Middle Passageage and the editor of Black Men speaking,

soon to come out from Indiana University Press.

Now, I wanted to ask, what brought this set together?

What was the occasion?

How did it start?

Shelley Fisher-Fishkin, the editor of the set.

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