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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, it's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

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

Today's is a very special show. I haven't spoken to my guest, David Reef, in some years. He's the brilliant

son of Philip Reef and Susan Sontag, and he has helped bring back to our consciousness

an absolutely devastating book. It's a book called D'Forsing. It's by Susan

Talbis. David wrote the introduction to it, and it's published by New York Review Books.

Look this up wherever you buy your books and order it right away because it will disappear

if you wait to the end of the show. Now, David, tell me, did you rediscover this book or was it stuck

in your memory? What was your relationship to it? Well, I, I, first of all,

it's nice to talk to you again after many years and in this strange netherworld we live in now,

where we're all ostensibly doing the same things, but we're sort of not. As far as divorcing, as far as

Susan Thomas' novel goes, of course I've known it all along. She, uh, I was in my late teens

when she took her own life only a week or two after the publication of divorcing,

although as I'm sure we'll get into,

she was not a person who is very attached to the world,

or well attached to the world,

or happily attached to the world, whatever I mean.

And the novel came out and I have, in my own library, my copy from then.

...