You are a human animal.

You are a very special dream,

for you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm. I'm here today with William T.

Volman, the author most recently of the Ice shirt, published by Viking. Previously, the author of

the Rainbow Stories and You Bright and Risen Angels. Now, how to start? This is, to begin with, very odd.

These books are as different from one another as they can be, and at the same time, as similar

as one can imagine. But I guess I'll start out. Why Icelandic sagas? Well, Michael, I'm working on a series of

novels about our continent over the last thousand years. There are going to be seven of those books.

Each novel involves an encounter between Europeans and Native Americans. The first encounter that we have any real documentation on

is that between the Norse Greenlanders and the Indians in about 1,000 AD.

So that was the logical place to start.

I've also loved sagas for 10, 15 years I've been reading them in translation,

and I think the best of them are certainly among the best

literature in the entire world.

Well, I remember when I came to read the Epic of Gilgamesh for the first time, I was so

shocked by the enormous comedy of the primitive violence in the, um, in Gilgamesh. I mean,

so brilliant and, you know, the almost like the nursery rhymes of violence.

It's true. And then the ending is so just incredibly sad.

Yes, yes.

And so what I found here that joined this to your other work was a kind of breathless

...