Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without Goodt, Bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and today my guest is Tommy Orange.

I want to say, yes, he's a national phenomenon. His very first book,

There, There, which is published by the very astute people at Alfred A. Knapp, landed immediately

on the bestseller list, but that's not what interests

me. He is a Native American writer of mixed ancestry, but that's not what interests me. What

interests me is that I think that he is a real writer, an honest to goodness

writer worth reading, concerned with things that writers are concerned with. These things include

time and space and dream and the intersection of unknowable, unknown characters in places that you wouldn't

expect them to meet. That is to say, the book, There, There, is a landscape that ostensibly

takes place in Oakland. But it begins with the notion of contradiction.

Gertrude Stein, who was born in Oakland, said there is no there-there-there, and here the

title of this book tells us, there-there. This is my home, and there's a there, there.

As much as I may love Gertrude Stein, I come from somewhere.

It's Oakland, and Oakland can have a literature as well.

Were you concerned, when you're growing up in a place like Oakland and wanting to be a writer,

were you concerned that the place was without a literature?

...