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 Sorbrad, and this is Bookworm.

Today, we're talking to Monique Twong.

Do I have that pronounced more or less correctly?

Do it for me, please.

Okay, it's Trung.

Trong.

Mm-hmm.

Thank you. And the book is calledung. Trung. Thank you.

And the book is called the Book of Salt.

It's published by Houghton Mifflin.

And, you know, I was curious about this book because of its subject matter.

It's narrated by the Vietnamese cook in the kitchen of Alice B. Tockelos and Gertrude Stein.

But as I began to read it, I realized it was more than a novelty item, that it was really

its own work of literature. It's not imitative in any way of Gertrude Stein. It has its own

evolving aesthetics. It seems to me that as it proceeds, the things that literature has recently

discovered about imperialism, about gender, about queer theory, are incorporated but

politicized, altered, and revised. So I have to say that I found this to be an absolutely

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