Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, into bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Russell Banks.

He's been our guest many times before.

He's one of my favorite people to talk to. And I think it's all been worthwhile

because his new novel, Lost Memory of Skin, is, I think, a new kind of novel for him. He's

particularly known for a blue-collar realism as typified by the books that became the movie's

affliction or the sweet

hereafter.

But this goes way back in his work to a more, I would say, dreamlike hallucinogenic space

in which truly original characters are trying to talk to one another across a great golf.

They're the kind of characters that America is inventing only in the last decades.

We haven't read about them before.

In this case, in lost memory of skin, who were those two major characters, Russell?

Well, the one that we meet first and who sort of acts as the fulcrum for the novel is called The Kid.

A 22-year-old convicted sex offender living under a causeway with other

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