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Boots.

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

Goes into the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we mean without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very, very happy I get to talk to and see Thomas McWain for the first time in many years.

His book, a book of short stories, is Crowfare. It's published by Knapp.

Several of the stories were read by me in The New Yorker as they came out, and it's a pleasure

to read them again, along with ten others, a nice-sized collection of new stories by Thomas

McGuane. Now, once upon a time when his first book, The Sporting Club, came out, he was sort of compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a generation of, oh, gentlemen and gentle women who were losing

their purchase on American life. The Bushwack piano saw that loosen up still more,

and then things became so hectic in the high sixties and early 70s that one anticipated a McGuane novel with a species of excitement and dread.

Then close thine eyes with holy dread, for he on honeydew has fed and drunk the milk of paradise.

Now he's settled down enough that the rugged craziness of the stories has sort of taken a backseat

and these stories really follow the rules of short stories

...