Hereby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

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

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Rick Moody, whose new book, Hotels of North America,

has recently been published by Little Brown.

This is, to my mind, a truly strange and funny book, but so remorseful and sad that it's enormous and kind of ebullient mean humor is need in the groin by the sadness of the narrator,

who has realized that he's really failed in every aspect of his life.

Now, having no home, no wife, out of touch with his child, having lost his girlfriend,

he wanders from hotel to hotel in North America, writing reports about

hotels, not the hotels he's in that night, but the hotels he once stayed in when he

was a little bit happier, when there was something to live for. Oh, Rick.

Don't you like to give us something to live for? Well, I'm hoping that the language is such as to

provide some entertainment as a cross current against the woe of this poor guy.

That's the idea that a few jokes hopefully can, and the richness of the descriptive language can serve as a tonic.

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