This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books Podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week I'm very pleased to be joined by the American writer Jonathan Ames, who's the author of several books.

Most recently, well not quite most recently,

but most recently published in the UK, just to give you, it, is the extra man. And Jonathan's

going to read to us for a moment or two from his book, and then we'll talk a bit about it.

Okay, well, just to set up the two little passages, one having to do with cockroaches, one having to do with fleas.

So the book is about the friendship between two roommates, a young writer who lives with

an eccentric, older playwright, and they live in very close, dirty quarters in Manhattan,

a very tiny apartment. And the first passage I'm going to read is that Lewis,

the narrator, has just cooked some spaghetti, left it on a plate, left the kitchen momentarily to

use the bathroom, came back to his spaghetti, and that's where we pick up. When I came back

to the kitchen, there was a cockroach in the middle of my spaghetti.

Oh, God, there's a cockroach on my food, I bellowed. What? said Henry. A cockroach on top of my

spaghetti. You forgot the first rule of survival in this apartment, said Henry, without sympathy.

Never leave food out. You didn't teach me that rule, I said. You should have learned it

before coming here. Don't enlist in the military if you're not prepared to fight. I threw the pasta

away and the cockroach, since I am unable to kill anything directly, even cockroaches,

with which our apartment was infested, though none had ever been so brave as to mount my food.

After dumping the pasta, I boiled some more water and started all over. Henry from his

couch told me to wash my dish, and added that I should always wash my dishes before eating.

He explained to me, teaching me some survival rules, after all, that our cockroaches were walking

...