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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tens to the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

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

One of my favorite writers, a writer I've only known for the last, oh, 10 years. I think that she's a

marvel. Her name is Tessa Hadley. Many of her short stories systematically appear in the New Yorker,

where she is very much admired, and she is the author of a new book, a terrific book called Free Love.

Now, the book takes place in 1967.

I want to acknowledge that when I was living in Bologna in around 1967. What the Italian men wanted to speak to me about in the

youth hostel where I was saying was Amore Libre. They couldn't get enough of free love.

It defined the times for them, and when they heard I was from America,

they would ask Americans and the English all about free love. So tell me, Tessa Hadley,

about London in 1967. I was a child, in fact, in 1967,

but I remembered it when it came to plunging down into that world.

A grey England of drizzle and bowler-hatted men

yielded to something multicoled dazzling, doped, loud.

I don't know if you've been watching that Beatles documentary recently, but that seemed

to encapsulate it so perfectly.

...