Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

From KCNW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to continue with my guest, Robert Koover, this time entirely about his book,

A Child Again, published recently by McSweeney's.

It's a collection of short fictions and puzzles and games, and there's even a deck of cards

affixed to the back of the book that shuffled together can retell and retell a story.

And I want, because in a certain sense,

all of Koover's themes are embedded everywhere.

In the shuffling of the cards,

one finds his interest in repetition.

In the same unusual card story, we find that however the characters are situated,

they're all the same. Anything can be said about any of them, depending on the order of the

storytelling. It is saying something ultimately, it seems to me,

that no matter how many quirks and eccentricities we may present,

that as people were stuck being people,

that were all caught in the same pack of cards,

and that our stories are only different from one another

depending upon the incidentals, the way the deck happens to be shuffled. Is that? That's pretty good.

...