Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Thorpeblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest to writer I've wanted to talk to for a long time.

It's Stuart Dybeck. His book, I sailed with Magellan, a book of interrelated short stories,

has been published by

Farris Strauss and Giroux.

It's the third in a trilogy of stories of sorts that began with a book called The Coast of Chicago

and Another Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.

This comes 10 years after the last of those two volumes. He's the author as well

of a book of poems and prose poems called Brass Knuckles. And I sailed with Magellan

does this kind of remarkable thing. I only know it elsewhere, perhaps in Bruno Schultz,

the creation of a world of childhood in which the saturations of childhood has made the world in memory, much more mysterious, perhaps, than it had been day by day at its time.

And although Stuart Dybeck does not go so far as Mr. Schultz is to make his father into a buzzer, a doorbell,

and his uncle into a banister,

nevertheless, there's something about the way in which

the neighborhood, its traditions, its ethnicities,

steep into the prose that make it much more than a factual account.

Now, these started in their way as prose poems?

...