Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed

for you are the only animal

Who can think, who can reason, who can read

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt

And this is bookworm.

Today my guest is Saman Rushdie,

whose new novel Fury has recently been published by Random House.

I always feel foolish with a very famous and well-regarded guest by me and others to list their books.

I assume that they're well-known, but Rushdys include Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame,

the Satanic Verses, most recently the Moors' Last Sigh and the Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Now Fury is both, it seems to me, a more comic and sadder novel than any of them recently, perhaps

because of its compression?

I think it really is.

I think it's a sad book written like a funny book, you know, and because I didn't want

the feeling of the book to be melancholy.

However, the character is a melancholic character.

You know, he's come out of a great crisis in his life,

or at least he's still in the great crisis in his life,

but he's tried to leave it behind in London,

fled to New York, and found, of course, that he had brought it with him.

...