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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Matthew Klam.

He's the author of the

Book of Short Stories, Sam the

Cat. It's his first book.

And many of these stories, I think

perhaps all of them, appeared first in The New Yorker.

And I wanted to have a conversation that will take in a lot of ground about, you know, finding

one's short stories suddenly cresting a wave. Now, I'd imagine that these stories, as you presented them in writing workshops, et cetera,

must have aroused a certain amount of furor.

What was the response to your work when you started showing it around?

Well, the only story that appeared in a workshop, per se, was Sam the Cat, the first story.

And I was, I don't think, you know, I knew then that I needed to have two or three or four out of, say, 15 people like me.

And I knew I might be okay if that was the case.

But there was this moment in that graduate writing program where this is at Hollins College,

and it was a nine-month-long, pretty short thing, where people got to get up, do readings of whatever they wanted to do.

...