Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

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.

Nicole Krause has written a book of short stories called To Be a Man,

and I found the stories very profound, very beautifully written,

and unlike many stories being written in our time,

very emotional as well.

Now, Nicole, you have told me that you had this title to begin

with. What led you to it? I remember that I was riding up in the elevator to visit my publisher

with the proposal, this idea that I was going to write a novel, which didn't

exist yet, which became Far as Dark, and then I was going to write a collection of stories.

And I only had ever written a couple of those stories. So this was a big idea in my mind.

And as I wrote up in the elevator thinking about titles, which one has to offer,

this one just floated into my head. And I remember at the time thinking a number of things. One was,

I've spent as much of my life as a writer trying to inhabit men, trying to know what it is to be them, think like them,

to become them on the page.

And my curiosity for them and my compassion for those characters has been large.

And then the other thought was, well, you know, I'm in my 40s now.

Like many women, I've had an enormous amount of experience with men from the time I was a child,

...