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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tzuberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

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

Today, I'm happy to have us my guest, Scott McClanahan. He's the young author, but he's written

quite a few books already. The most

recent is the Sarah book. It's published by one of the best of the small independent presses.

That's Tyrant Press. He's the author as well of Crapalachia. I think that was published by another

favorite small press, $2.00 radio. The Sarah book is a book about the end of a marriage, the excitement

of a marriage, the terror of a marriage, and the bonded condition.

And Crapalagia is a book that is attempting to define the place where this author,

Scott McConahan, is from.

He's from West Virginia.

He scolds other writers for writing an Appalachian minstrel show.

I put that at the end of Crapalachia in some ways not realizing how insulting it would seem to the people that I mentioned there.

It was more out of, I guess, frustration, just the type of writing that comes from the region,

the types of books that are published from the region, historical fiction, sort of kind of quasi-social realism.

So I put that there more as just like a little joke that I thought was kind of silly.

But yeah, I believe that there's probably some honesty there in the way that the region has been stereotyped and, you know,

...