Hereby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where we'd be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, one of our favorite guests is here with us.

It's Salman Rushdie, who has written an otherworldly novel called Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights.

Is it fair to translate that?

Yes.

I mean, it's a thousand and one night.

In fact, I just found myself wondering when thinking about the thousand and one nights,

and what is that in English, so speak, and worked it out, and then found myself

pleased by the fact that there was a kind of symmetrical number hidden inside the famous number,

you know, the 2-8, 28. Of course, people already are delighting in telling me that it doesn't

work if there's a leap year.

Whereas the thousand and one nights happen just once in history, the Sultan has been killing a virgin a knight,

...