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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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Rick Moody, the author most recently of a novel, Purple America,

from Little Brown.

His previous books in reverse order are the ring of brightest angels around heaven,

the ice storm, and garden state,

which has also been republished recently in a paperback edition.

That was his first novel.

Now, I remember that when we were in camp and singing those kinds of catastrophe songs. Oh, I don't mean you were in camp with me.

Yeah, I understand.

That one would come to that middle point where you would say, second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.

And in a certain way, Purple America seems to me to be the apotheosis of themes latent

in the ice storm that what had been an ice storm in the ice storm has become all-out

nuclear war.

And I wondered if you could talk about that, the escalation.

I was thinking about something with respect to this that you actually said the last time we

talked when you described some of the characters in my short story collection as being

sacrificial victims.

...