You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Soberblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Richard Bausch, the author most recently of violence, of novel, also of Mr.

Field's daughter, and his most recent book of short stories was the fireman's wife and

other stories.

This book is published by

Houten Mifflin. Let's see. It's very interesting to me to read a novel, this unadorned.

You know, I think there are only a couple of metaphors in it. At one point, the Manta ray seen in an aquarium is described as having a ghostly cape,

but not much else.

Can you speak about the strip down form?

My aesthetic, and it's not new with me, of course, but for me as a writer, while I love to read,

lush, heavy paragraphs loaded up with metaphors, as a writer, I just assume the words disappear.

I would like the reader to lose the sense of me as a writer.

So, I mean, there's a lot of different ways to skin the fictive cat,

but for me, the best thing for my work is that the reader lose the sense that he's reading a book.

Why in particular?

I know that this is a common thing.

It's, you know, Russell Banks and has been sort of knocking around in fiction since Carver came around and shook things up. But why in particular that? I guess because it feels most comfortable to me and it feels truer. It seems to me that there's a lot of embellishment.

In some cases, maybe the writer's trying to hide something, at least where I'm concerned, as a writer.

...