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.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm lucky to have as my guest, Martin Amos, whose novel, Yellow Dog, was published

by Miramax Books.

Now, as I started reading this book, I had recently stopped smoking.

So I read it with the forced attentiveness of someone trying not to smoke and keep his eyes on the page.

And so a rather obsessional reading occurred in a novel that seemed to me to be obsessionally constructed, in fact.

So I was finding myself following these characters up all kinds of false paths through false

vicinities, a character in the first pages, is going to Hollywood,

but it turns out to be the name of a bar in the East End.

He's going to be going to hospital.

He's been accused eventually of having grasped on Joseph Andrews,

who for me is a hero of a Henry Fielding novel.

And so throughout, I was reading like a lunatic,

like a reader of a Middle Nabokov English novel,

novel in English, rather, not English novel,

tracking down what I thought were constantly coups

and enjoying this book because it seemed the most giddy and maddened

...