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.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy to be talking to Zachary Mason, the author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey,

a collection of intertwined stories inspired by Homer's epic poem. It's published

by Farras Strauss and Giroux. The Odyssey is about a hero's attempts to return home at the end of

the Trojan War. The gods have cursed Odysseus, so the reunion with his wife Penelope is thwarted

and interrupted. A sorceress attempts to enchant him. A princess

tries to seduce him. The giant one-eyed cyclops entraps him. Zachary Mason's wonderful new book

breaks the 10-year voyage home into its component stories and gives us the opportunity to

recombine and reimagine what happens from many perspectives,

sort of like twisting a narrative Rubik's Cube until what we assemble is the Lost Books of the Odyssey.

Tell me, you don't come from the writing programs and the normal roots of literature. Tell them how this book began. How did you

begin to write it? That's a good question. So I've never really had a writing class,

except for one when I was 11 years old. My background is in math and physics, and I did a PhD

in computer science.

But I've been writing on my own since I was about 19 years old.

And for 10 years or so, I didn't tell anybody about it.

And I didn't complete anything substantial, just sort of fragments of short stories and the like.

...