Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

When I picked up a book of stories called Heads of the Coloured People, and I started to read it.

I just flipped.

It seemed to me to be so modern, so up to date, so full of things that I don't know,

that I wanted to interview Nefisa Thompson Spires, that's Thompson hyphen Spires. We're going to hear the first, oh, two pages in a paragraph of that first story.

It has an amazing title. It's called Heads of the Colored People, Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology.

Take it away.

One.

Riley wore blue contact lenses and bleached his hair, which he worked with gel and a blow dryer

and a flat iron, some mornings into Sonic the Hedgehog spike so stiff you could prick your finger

on them, and sometimes into a wispy side-swooped bob with long bangs, and he was black.

But this wasn't any kind of self-hatred thing.

He'd read the bluest eye, an invisible man in school,

and even picked up disgruntled at a book fair, and yes, they were good, and there was some resonance in those books for him,

but this story isn't about race or the shame of being alive, or any of those things.

...