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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Timothy O'Grady.

He's come from London to talk about his new novel, I Could Read the Sky, which is an unusual

novel in that it is a collaboration with a

photographer, Steve Pike. And in a way, the book that this most reminds me of is the

collaboration between James Agee and Walker Evans called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In that book, they went down south on an assignment from

Fortune magazine to talk to and interview sharecroppers during the Depression in the

Appalachians. And the images that came back from their expedition were extraordinary, as was the supposedly

factual but really quite poetic versions of these interviews that James A.G. shaped and put

into the book. How did I could read the sky come into being?

Well, it wasn't, it came into being in a way

maybe you wouldn't expect. I mean, it was, it was a

an assignment that Steve Pike and I had. I didn't know him at the time, but a

publisher asked me what I'd be interested in collaborating with him. He had a

body of work of photographs that he had been building up for

about 10 years in Ireland. And the publisher that I had had at the time was anxious to get me

writing a book. And so they asked me, would I collaborate with him in some way? And I said I would

...