Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No to 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.

I am very happy to have as my guest, Wallace Sean, but doubly so, because sometimes a person, a writer, you know well,

does a piece of work that's so beautiful, so accomplished.

I have the feeling that this new book,

a brief essay in book form called Night Thoughts, will be with us for a very long time. I'm inclined to say

we'll be with us as long as there is still time. And it's a book that I didn't expect

Wallace Sean to write because it is in in its way, an optimistic, even idealistic work about the possibility

of our future, the possibility that we have a future.

And I guess I wanted to begin, if you could estimate for me, by your estimate, how many Wallace Shons are there?

You mean within myself?

Yes.

Or others walking around?

No, within you.

There's the playwright. There's the essay you. There's the playwright.

There's the essayist.

...