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, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblot, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm very happy to have as my guest, Rudolf Wurlitzer, whose new book, The Drop

Edge of Yonder, has just been published by a rather new press called Two Dollar Radio.

They began publishing in 2005.

So it's really one of their, you know, this is one of their first seasons.

And Rudolf Wurlitzer is the author of, I think, in order,

Nog, Flats, Quake, Slow Fade,

a book about travel and spirit and mourning

called Hard Travel to Sacred Places,

and now the drop edge of yonder,

which is a kind of Buddhist Western.

And it's a very beautiful and strange book. I was delighted to get it. It had been 14 years,

I believe, since hard travel to sacred places came out, and he's a writer whose continuing existence is very meaningful to me. Tell me, how did this book get written? Well, the story

of this book starts way back in the 70s. I had written, for its own sake, a script.

I was sort of fascinated by the frontier and the history of the frontier and the

language of the early days in the West, the kind of spontaneous exuberance of that language

and what it meant to this wave of expansion that was

...