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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.

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

Today, I'm very pleased and honored to have us my guest, Tony Morrison, who has been

on the show once before.

Once again, we are speaking to her by phone,

to her home in New York,

and the occasion is the publication of her new novel, Love.

She is the author, of course, in reverse order,

of Paradise, Jazz, Beloved, Tar Baby,

Song of Solomon, Sula, and the Blueest Eye.

Those are her novels.

I wanted to begin by saying that it struck me that people are needing several years to read jazz, to read Paradise, and now love, because the books

seem to me to be extremely brilliant and complex in their organization. This book, Love, seems to me, to be about time and place, the way in which depending on who you are and when you are there, your experience changes who you are, what love is, and what you know.

The setting of this place has once been a resort.

The people in the resort have moved into a home on Monarch Street.

They are in an area that has been once an ocean side,

but now there's a place called Oceanside, not by an ocean side, but now there's a place called oceanside, not by an ocean, with

very cheap government housing. Other places that people remember are covered now by water.

...