Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

Even the thought of it's so absurd.

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be?

Where would we be without good?

No to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books? From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm talking to Steve Erickson, one of our nation's terrific writers who's written his, I think, ninth novel, These Dreams of View.

It's published as a paperback original by Europa, and it takes the stakes of novel writing

about as far as I think they can go because it subjects everything.

Life, home, career, spouse, children to possible loss.

It's going to take a character whose name is Zan and take everything step by step away from him,

leaving him with the things that we're left with when everything else is

gone. Certain dreams, certain songs, things that are stuck in his head, refrains, bits of music,

and track him there. Now, what is it about you that makes you make your characters surrender so much in the course of a book?

I mean, I think all work has a personal quality about it.

Even the most imagined work is informed by some kind of personal experience.

And it may be that in this particular book, that fourth wall, if you will, comes down faster and louder and more resoundingly than any of the other novels.

...