Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, into the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

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

Today, Valeria Gwisselli is my guest.

Her book, Lost Children Archive, is an archive. It's labeled as a novel.

But it's many things at once. It wants to explore as many forms at once because the people

who are lost children are looking to find out who they are,

what form they fit, and the parents in this book are driving toward the southern border

to encounter the lost children and discover that they and their children are among the lost children,

that it is not until we accept the condition of being lost that we can begin to find ourselves again.

I feel very happy to have been enabled to read Valeria Luiselli from the very beginning.

In your last book, you did a collaboration with workers after hours, some of whom worked on an assembly line,

and they got to contribute to the direction of the book.

This book too seems to me to be the product of people who are not usually invited to participate

and tell their stories within the dominant culture.

You began to collect their stories.

How did you go about this?

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