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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good news in the bird?

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

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Sulferblad, and this is Bookworm. I'm really happy

to have Michael Cheyvon on the show today, and his new book is Telegraph Avenue, and he's hit it out of the park.

Everyone is saying so, I agree.

But the first thing that you have to say about it is how audacious it is.

He's writing a novel that takes place basically in the black community.

Yes?

Were you frightened?

Were you nervous?

Were you scared?

I mean, what?

You know, when I was not writing, sometimes I felt prey to anxiety, no doubt, lying

in bed at night, asking myself if I had,

you know, the right to do this or even if I did have the right, which I felt fairly confident.

I did was that, did I have the chops?

Did I have the perspective and the imagination to be able to do it?

And, you know, sometimes I question that, but when I was actually writing, when I was writing from the point of view of Gwen or Archie or Titus or any of the other African American characters in my book, I, you know, they were just my characters. They were characters the same as all the other characters

I've ever struggled to get into whose heads I've struggled to get into. And it wasn't any

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