Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

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

Today I'm really thrilled to have as my guest, Mary Gateskill,

whose new book of stories, Don't Cry, has just come from Pantheon.

You know, I have a very deep response to Mary Gateskills writing, and, you know, I feel that

it's often so profound and so painful that I have to be sure that I read it when I'm capable of withstanding

its battering.

And then to my surprise, when I read Don't Cry, I found an entirely new sort of story,

several new kinds of stories from Mary Gateskill, and arrange almost,

I would say, like a collage of compassionate feeling that was new to me in the work, and I found very, very grateful for it. Do you feel that these

stories are new for you? Well, first I want to say thank you for your appreciation of them.

It's very kind of a relief to me because a lot of people have talked about how violent and twisted

and malformed the people in this book are. And I don't, it's a little disturbing and scary to me

to hear that because it doesn't seem that way. So I'm glad that you don't. They do seem different

to me, although it's hard for me to analyze exactly how, because it would take a while for me to get a distance.

I will say, though, that I've never experienced my work as brutal and uncompassionate as you just said.

I never felt that the stories I did in the past were hard or anything like that,

but maybe the softer qualities that I perceived in them I could perceive because I was kind of

...