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.

Hi, this is Michael Sulfur Silverblad and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Rick Moody.

He's the author most recently of The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, a novella and

Stories published by Little Brown.

His earlier novel, The Ice Storm, came out recently in paperback from Warner Books,

and he's the author of an earlier novel still called Garden State.

I wanted to begin by talking about authorial persona, and I guess I'll begin by noticing that the book is dedicated to John Hawks.

Hawks is kind of famous after his very first book appeared, called The Cannibal,

for saying that he liked the identification between the novelist and the criminal.

The first-person speaker in that book is a general who at the book's climax

cuts apart and eats a young child.

And he hawks kind of enjoyed implying with the first person that this was an artistic event or, on the other hand,

that art was a criminal event.

And I wonder, since these stories in your new book move on to queasy moral ground, if you

would speak about that relationship.

That's really interesting.

You know, obviously the books dedicated to Hawks because he was my teacher and influential in my development.

But I suppose that that kind of remark is just the aspect of this instruction that I found most valuable in some way.

...