Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tenderberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have one of my favorite novelists with me.

The last time I saw him, he had just written his take on the

thousand and one nights on Scheherazade, and this time round, two books later, Salman Rushdie

has written a book pronounced in his way, the French way, Kishat,

one of the things that I love most about Kikotay,

and correct me if I'm wrong,

but it seems to be the first novel, certainly the first I've read,

where the second part of the novel, certainly the first I've read, where the second part of the novel actually amplifies, contradicts, runs all sorts of ragged riffs on the first.

And is much better than it.

Because between part one and part two, someone plagiarized a Quixote.

Yes, yes.

There were several, actually, and all around Spain, Servantes, who'd written part one in prison,

comes out to meet all sorts of pseudo-servantes with their pseudo-quixote's and

...