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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 welcome to Bookworm.

Today, it's my great honor to continue talking with Rudolph Warlitzer.

We've discussed his first novel and the screenplay Tulane Blacktop that was made possible

because of it, and we're going to move on to a darker period of American life and writing

with his two following books, flatsats and Quake, and a screenplay to a Sam Peck and Paul

movie, well, what became a Sam Peck and Paul movie, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Now, you have to understand that although people say that the 60s didn't end until the mid-70s,

there was an invisible dividing line, and you could see it in the books that started to emerge.

We had, in this period, remarkable fiction happening in

America. Thomas Pinshan has published V. It is a troubled book, but not so troubled as the

crying of Lop 49 will be and the things that come after it.

Books like John Barth's, The Sotweed Factor, and before them,

The Floating Opera and the End of the Road, talked about the end, the death of innocence.

John Hawks was deconstructing the landscape of the post-World War II, Europe and bringing it to America in books like the Beatles'

leg, Europe in the lime twig and the cannibal. We have books that are completely made of fragments after naked lunch.

William Burroughs starts to write completely cut-up novels like the ticket that exploded,

books that you would read with guaranteed incomprehension.

...