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.

This is a very joyful day for me because I am at last getting to meet and talk to Maxine

Hong Kingston, whose writing has been a great subject

for my admiration and repeated respect. She is the author, of course, of Woman Warrior,

China Man, Tripmaster Monkey, his fake book, a book I don't know called Hawaii One Summer, and a book of essays

about poetry and poems to be the poet.

Her new book is the fifth book of peace.

It's published by Alfred A. Knapp.

And in many ways, it brings together many of the concerns of the earlier books in a formal way,

a desire to have the reader participate in the structuring of an experience so that the experience becomes formed by writing and communicated through writing and changed by writing.

But let's start by asking, what is a book of peace?

I am hoping that a book of peace? I am hoping that a book of peace would be a way to imagine our world in loving harmony.

and it would be a book in which I can write about people and characters

who can solve their problems and their interactions with one another

in loving, nonviolent ways.

But apparently there is an imaginary tradition of books of peace in Chinese literature,

yes?

...