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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tiberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm, one of my very favorite writers, who I've known virtually from her first book on, Mary Gateskill is my guest today.

She's made a very special book. The book is called The Devil's Treasure. It's a book of stories

and dreams. It also contains sections of three of her earlier novels,

maybe a fourth one that is ongoing. A connecting story runs through the novels. It's a shuffle.

Each page has a colored margin, which gives us a clue as to where the

material is from. And the book seems to be an attempt to account autobiographically, intellectually, for the state of aesthetics of the books of

Mary Gateskill, which I personally find and continue to find fascinating. There's a section in here from Veronica, which I'd remembered when

reading the book that's so powerful, so strong, and so beautiful. It was fascinating to see it

in the company of other pieces of Mary's writings and dreams. Tell me, Mary,

how did this book come about? Well, in a very kind of eccentric way, I would never have occurred

to me to do a book like this, but I have a friend in Houston named Michael Zolko, who I met back in the 90s, who was a very eclectic person.

He's very involved in all kinds of projects.

He used to run a record company in New York back in the 80s called Z Records.

And they produced, you know, people like King Creole and the coconuts and James White and the Blacks.

So that is the kind of project he would be into, that kind of a small but a strange kind of

very hand-picked group of people. And so he wanted, you know, much later in life to do something

...