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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

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

Today, I have the honor and thrill of talking to Rachel Kushner.

She's done a collection of her essays from the year 2000 to 2020. The book is called The Hard Crowd, and once again, it's being

published by Scribner. Now, I had read a few of these essays, but by no means the majority of them.

And one of the pleasures of this book is that it taught me a great deal.

And not just about Rachel Kushner, but the thing that absolutely floored me,

there was an essay called Our Prisons Necessary.

In the course of the essay, Rachel points out that many people think of the question as meaning,

shall we have dangerous people back on the street? And that, it turns out, much to my surprise, is not what prison abolition is about.

Can you tell me what it is about, Rachel?

I can certainly try.

Thanks, Michael.

Prison abolition, as I have come to understand it, through

reading about it, and also through a kind of intensive dialogue that I had the pleasure of

undertaking with a scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who I write about in the book, abolition is really

...