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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'm very pleased to have as my guest, Ralph Sassone.

He's the author of a new novel, a first novel called The Intimates, published by Faris

Strauss and Cheru. Now, when I read the book, I said, this is not a first novel. It's too well-structured.

It's too accomplished at the kinds of things that first novelists usually don't do well.

So I thought we'd talk about this unusual thing and very difficult thing right now,

the first novel.

First of all, Ralph, you're published by the publisher that probably most writers want most, Farras, Strauss and

Giroux. How did this all happen? Well, I'm very proud to be associated with them,

obviously, and how it happened was the way so much of my writing life has happened, which was

circuitously. I had written something resembling the first section of the book, and it was given to a man, a literary agent who read it, enjoyed it, encouraged me.

And then I wrote the second section.

He encouraged me more. I wrote the third section. He became my literary agent. But when the time came to send the book out to various publishers and hope that one of them would accept it. And he told me not only that he was sending it to that house, but to a particular editor at that house, I was very surprised.

Petrified, I would think. I was, well, I thought it was a moment of insanity on his part because I associated this editor with, rightly, with, you know, serious and revered literary figures.

And at the risk of sounding too humble, I didn't think that my book could stand in that

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