Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

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

Today I have as my guest, Richard Ford.

His new novel is called Canada.

It's published by Echo Press, a new publisher for him. Well, he's,

you know, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of many books. And he's been a guest on Bookworm

many times. And I feel like this new book, Canada, really has brought to the surface many of the mysteries in Richard Ford's writing, which

is to say, I want to say this straight out, that what he does is to present oppositions,

disguise them underneath beautiful writing, so that basically everything is turning into opposites.

Twins are distinctly fraternal twins.

The border between America and Canada, presumably nothing happens to us when we cross that border.

We're in two different states of mind, which suddenly, with a flick of a wrist, of a writing wrist,

become the same place and a different place and the same place again, and we're constantly

faced with the switching of identical allegiance.

Is that something like what's going on for you, Richard?

Yes, it is.

It is something like.

I got very interested in how things that look alike are very dissimilar

...