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?

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

Today, my guest is Oscar Iguelos.

His most recent book is Mr. Ives' Christmas, published by Harper Collins.

You, of course, know him as the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning the Mambo Kings play

Songs of Love, as well as the 14 sisters of Emilio Montez-O'Brien

and Our House in the Last World.

I wanted to begin by saying that it seems to me that each of your books has a key signature,

that in Mombo Kings, the tonalities were all going to be those of raunchy macho.

In the 14 Sisters, it was a kind of flirtatious and bubbly tone of love.

Here, grief and mourning are the, you know, the key

signature. And I wonder, you know, are these desires to discover the language of these emotions?

Yeah. It's funny. One of the first things I wrote in the book is, ironically enough, when I started discovering what the book was about, found Ives sitting in a church and meditating.

And in those moments, I felt sort of transported to a place that would give me the means to understand what someone like Ives,

not myself, would be privy to.

And I realized that, you know, his world, his way of looking at things, his language all came down to a sort of,

I don't know, blissful, painful, ecstatic, frightened meditation on, you know,

religion and also afterlife and notions like that and ordinary human pain.

...