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 KCRW and KCRW.com,

I'm Michael Silverblatt,

and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm happy to have

in the studio in New York,

the Carnegie Hall studio, Rudolf Wurlitzer.

And the occasion is the republication by a wonderful small press called Two-dollar Radio

of his first three books.

Those books were Nog, Flats, and Quake. They came out respectively

in 1968, 1970, and 1972. I thought it would be interesting to go back to that period to 1968 and see where these books came from, what allowed them to be.

I think the three books, which, you know, are sometimes called a trilogy,

although I don't think they were written specifically as a trilogy.

Were they?

No, actually, they weren't.

They were written quite separately.

But looking back on them in time, they seem to share themes with one another

that Rudolf Wurlitzer's later novels don't share with them.

...