Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

From KCRW,

Santa Monica,

I'm Michael Silverblatt,

and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is

Rafe Larson.

He's the author

of a first novel

called the Selected Works

of T.S. Bivit,

which is published by the Penguin Press.

And, well, it's not just a first novel. It's a very unusual-looking first novel.

That is to say, it has pictures and charts and maps and graphs,

and these, which are in the margins, are worked out to run in parallel to the text in interesting ways

and also to be visualizations that will impart knowledge.

These charts and graphs and maps are made by the young cartographer, hero of the book, T.S. Spivitt, who is 11 years old?

Twelve.

...