Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and today I'm very excited.

Rachel Kushner is on the show with her new novel, The Mars Room. It's published by Scribner, and it's a

remarkable piece of work. It's a novel that's largely set in a woman's prison, and for this novel,

Rachel went up and down the coast of California,

trying to learn as much about prisons as possible, often sneaking in with a group of criminology

students. So getting further into the inner mechanisms of the prisons.

Now, when you say you wanted to learn as much as you could about prisons, why was that?

Well, as a citizen of California and a resident of Los Angeles, I live in the, if L.A. as an urban center, I more or less live there walking distance from the large criminal court complex downtown and the city jail complexes.

And I wanted to be present for the proceedings of the criminal, so-called, justice system, and see who is going to court and what happens to them after their court proceeding and conviction.

And I had been aware for a long time that we embarked as a state, not me, on

an incredibly large prison building boom from the 1970s to the 1990s and that we have a very

large population of incarcerated people and I wanted to think about those people

and what that means and ask myself why our society is structured that way and why certain people

don't have to think about prison because the framework of it is more or less invisible

...