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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

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, it's a terrific honor and pleasure to have, as my guest, William H. Gass.

He's in the studio, the Clayton studio, in St. Louis. The occasion

is the publication of his new book of essays, life sentences from Knapp. Anyone who knows

Bookworm knows that I'm an admirer of William H. Gass, both of his extraordinary fiction, which began with Omen Settor's

lock and moved on to a collection of short stories that's still being read called In the

Heart of the Heart of the Country, a novel called The Tunnel.

And he's the author of essays, literary essays that take my breath away.

They include the famous fiction and the figures of life, finding a form.

The most recent are the tests of time, a temple of texts, and now life sentences.

Because he is an exquisite examiner of sentences, which are, after all, the unit out of which fiction,

philosophy, even thought itself, when articulated, are formed. I thought we would hear from an

essay, the aesthetic structure of the sentence.

You know, Gass has been writing essays so beautifully, so well, and for such a long time,

that these essays now have reached a point of abstract perfection that steps toward not only the beautiful and truthful, but somewhat

...