Hearby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Well, we're doing without books. Foundation. Boots. Where would we be without booms? Where would we be without good?

No, Tintuberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and today we're talking to William Vollman.

It's the second week we're spending on his new novel, The Dying Grass, a novel of the Nez Perce War.

And last week we talked about some of the ideas and the history behind the book, but now

I want to hear how the book sounds.

So the first thing we're going to do is to ask Bill Vohmann to give us a little bit of context

and to read a section from the early part of the book.

Well, thanks for having me back, Michael.

This is a little section near the beginning of the book.

The Nes-Pers have just been informed that they have to go on, the reservation,

they're going to be impoverished, maybe starved, and some of the young men just can't take it.

And so they rise up and commence the war with some atrocities.

Chief Joseph, whose real name is Hainmatt Tuyallakech, has just heard about this. He's come back home into his tepee and trying to

figure out what to do. And the name of his antagonist is General Howard, whom he calls cut arm. In the darkness,

...