Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

Hello, from KCRW. I'm Steve Erickson. As a novelist and professor at the University of California, Riverside, I want to welcome you to a special series, a bookworm retrospective, a celebration of 33 years of bookworm on KCRW.

As those of you familiar with bookworm know, the host of the show is Michael Silverblatt, who's been on leave for health reasons. I met Michael more

than three decades ago on the first of half a dozen occasions when I had the pleasure,

like many other authors, of coming on to Bookworm to talk about my work, including novels

such as Zeroville and Shadowbond. Bookworm was first broadcast in

1989. After the manager of KCRW at the time, Ruth Seymour met Michael at a dinner party,

where they talked many hours about poetry and literature.

Ruth wound up offering Michael a book show on the spot,

and while he was reluctant at first,

he went on to become the host of Bookworm and to record more than 1,600 conversations

with poets and authors of literary fiction.

Among his first guess was the American novelist and man of letters, Gore Vidal.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. We're doing a special show from the Beverly Hills Hotel, where my guest is Gore Vidal, whose new new novel Hollywood, the sixth in a series of novels

about American history, has just arrived from Random House.

These are very American novels, and you've spoken against a certain tradition, a romantic

...