Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason animal who can think who can reason who can read the cow

and welcome to bookworm this is michael silverblatt and today my guest is tom jones

who's recently published his third book of short stories sunny listin was a friend of mine

with little brown the earlier books were The Pugulist

at Rest and Cold Snap. Tom, the last time I saw you, you were reading Standahl and thinking

about novels. What happened? Well, the novels, you know, Michael, I'm writing that novel.

It's going okay.

In fact, I was just talking about the Red and the Black last night with a friend of mine,

and he had copied a line out of it.

He said it was just...

Stendahl was walking...

or the Gillian was walking up the steps,

and he was depressed, and every object he saw

sort of reaffirmed his depression and crushed him even further. And, uh, he said, boy. So he pulled

that out. He had an little piece of paper, you know, like a fortune cookie. And he read it to me

and we laughed, you know, because it was so true. I love that book.

I'm curious. Some of these read like fragments from abandoned novels, a couple of Vietnam stories, I think three of them.

And how do you know if a thing, if a story is going to become a story, if it has enough juice to go on and perhaps start a novel?

...