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 Sloverblant, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm happy to have as my guest, Nicole Krause, whose most recent novel is The History of Love,

published by Norton.

Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, is available in paperback from Anchor.

Now, you know, I truly loved these two books, and I felt about them the kind of consolation that literature sometimes brings when you feel as if the world has

taken over everything and that everything is spoiled. And then there are these writers.

And in this book, one of them is one of your characters who invents another kind of world,

another kind of thinking about the world.

The world is too painful, really.

This is in this book a character named Leo Gerski.

Tell me about him and how he came to you.

Well, he certainly invents things in order to survive,

and he has had to survive so much of life,

partly because he was born in Poland as a Jew,

unfortunately at the worst possible time.

And when the Holocaust happened, he had to hide and become invisible.

But he learned the trick of the imagination even younger.

...