Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read. I'm I'm KCRW Santa Monica I'm Michael

Silverblatt and this is bookworm today I'm very happy to have with me Yanik

Murphy and we're going to talk about her new novel Here They Come which has been

recently published by McSweeney's books, and very beautifully published

as well.

You know, every once in a while I get a book in the mail that just delights me, and this is

one of them.

Here they come by Yannick Murphy, because it's almost as if she said about to write a book

like The Five Little Peppers or Little Women,

which is like a group family novel, narrated taking place in the 1970s,

by someone who's telling you not what happened, but what happened to her, what happened the way she

experienced it. And this in childhood is very different from one's grown-up experiences.

And so the book is full of the thrilling misunderstandings, that sense of indignation and injustice that children

have when they're faced with the difficult adult world.

And full, too, of the way in which other things, very upsetting things, are not upsetting at all

because, after all, you're a kid and

you don't know yet that you're living in the middle of grown-up disorder and slovenliness,

that it's all right. And so the book has this lovely tone of great imaginative

...