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You are a human animal. You are a very special dream,

or 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, well, every time I make the mistake of saying on the air that we rarely do first novels on Bookworm nowadays, a flock of them come along that I love, and here's another one.

This is B-Season by Mila Goldberg. It's published by Doubleday.

And, well, it's kind of an amazing book, in a sense. It reminds me of the latter day, Frannie and Zouli. In Franny and Zui, for people who are no longer Salinger conscious,

Franny becomes susceptible to chanting to the God prayer,

and by the end of the novella,

she's taken off in a state of what others regard as depression and dementia and what she

regards as ecstasy. And this seems to me...

Wow. I mean, of course, I read it. I love Salinger. I read everything he's ever written,

but maybe it was just seated in the back of my mind.

It's interesting. Yeah, that is interesting.

So I thought since the literature of child ecstasy, child religious ecstasy, is not very extensive,

I wondered what the seeds for the bee season were.

Right.

Well, that's a real good question.

And I really have no idea, which is something I'm really glad about.

The writing process for me is pretty instinctual.

I don't do a whole lot of planning in advance.

And luckily, I have an extremely active or overactive imagination and a really active subconscious.

And I give a lot of the credit for what happens to my subconscious, basically.

...