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.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and I'm here with Bookworm today.

Our guests today are Susan Dach, the author of The Colorist, one of the recent books from the

vintage contemporary series, and her editor will be joining us later in the interview on the phone,

Robin Dessor of vintage books.

Susan Deich's novel, The Colorist, is her second novel.

It came out this year, and her first book was called L.C.

They're very unusual novels in a certain sense, in that they seem, at least to me, to be more politically and historically and, what would you say, theoretically centered than most contemporary writing is.

Is this feminist writing?

Well, maybe I should start with how I came to writing.

I started out as a painter.

And I think I was always sort of banging my head against the wall of narrative,

and I was doing very sort of narrative paintings,

and there were certain things that were like turning points for me in the late 70s,

I guess, where I finally just stopped making art and began writing.

One of those things was I saw a videotape by Chilean artist Juan Downey at the Whitney Biennial in about 1977,

and it was of a painting.

It was a videotape dramatization of the painting Las Meninas by Velazquez, where he had actors

perform in the parts of King Philip and the Infanta and the dwarfs.

...