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. Today I'm very

pleased to have as my guest, Nick Laird, who is both a novelist and a poet, has published

two novels and two volumes of poetry. The novels are Glover's Mistake, recently published by Viking,

Utterly Monkey. The two books of poetry are on purpose and to a fault. Now, Glover's mistake,

the new novel, strikes me as being, you know, writing progresses.

Utterly Monkey is a book with a very animated plot and hugely agitatable characters.

Glover's mistake strikes me as being an attempt to dive into the pool of difficult

consciousness and to find out how personality influences events. A different kind of novel,

it seems to me. I think that's right.

I think, well, I mean, writing progresses is certainly true,

but also I think the course you steer is almost set by the last book.

So where Utley Monkey was kind of light and fast and, you know, slapstick at times and optimistic and maybe romantic,

I wanted the next book to be dark,

you know, pessimistic, kind of not that much to happen

or at least to have space for thoughts to happen,

to have space for people to seem to come to conclusions in a way.

So I was kind of concerned when I started writing it

that it would be a different kind of book.

Now, a theme, it seems, in all these books and the poetry as well,

...