 Hi, thanks for having me. I don't entirely know how to how to describe a novel in six minutes So I'll tell you a little bit about how it came about. I The previous novel of zero was a dark satire about our reaction to the terrorist attacks in New York And after it was published. I've got a lot of readers who liked it very much But it's it's a bit of a difficult reading. I got a call from a woman one day saying I'm 86 and I'm in a book club and I'm reading your book the zero and I have to tell you I don't understand a word of it And I said why I'm like it's a little bit of a difficult book It's sort of Kafka-esque and it kind of moves away from from comprehension because I felt we Sort of had us an almost post-traumatic Collective break from reality after the terrorist attacks and she said yes, I didn't get a word of that either She said but I have a theory. I think your book is about 7-eleven And I paused for a moment and I said do you mean 9-eleven and she said what did I say? And I said you said 7-eleven, which is a convenience store and she said, oh right 9-eleven And then she nicely asked and which of your books would I like? So I I steered her to one of my other books But when I hung up the phone, I had this deep desire to write a book about 7-eleven And so I wrote the financial lives of the poets, which is about A financial journalist who leaves his job to start a poetry website, which predictably fails And then he ends up going to a 7-eleven one night and having his life sort of unravel. That's the basic plot When my friends my poet friends heard it was called the financial lives of the poets They said that is gonna be one short book But I did manage to squeeze 300 pages out. I think it's my most comic novel Mostly because of the voice of the narrator Matt Pryor The other brilliant thing I did was I made Matt a bad poet Which made freed me up from having to write above my abilities So I'm just gonna read one of Matt's poems and they are sprinkled throughout the novel although don't be scared off by it There's it's about 97% prose and 3% very prose like poetry This poem and like many of them they come up. He they start in one place and end somewhere else This one is called a brief political manifesto I was driving around the packed Costco parking lot looking for a space and listening to some guy on NPR Talk about America's growing suburban poor when I saw this woman with four kids little stepladders Two four six eight waiting to climb in the car while mom loaded a cask of peanut butter and pallets of swimsuits Into the back of this all-wheel-drive vehicle and the kids were so cute that I waved That's when I saw the most amazing thing is the woman bent over to pick up a barrel of grape juice Her low-rise pants rose low and right there in the small of her back stretched a single strained String a thin strap of fabric. Yes, the devil's floss. I kid you not a thong I swear to God a thong now me. I'm okay with the thong Politically and aesthetically. I'm fine with it being up there or out there wherever it happens to be My only question is when did mom start wearing them I remember my mom's underwear laundry was one of our chores. We folded those things awkwardly like fitted sheets We snapped them like tablecloths. Thwap my sister stood on one end me on the other and we walked toward each other twice We folded those things like big american flags hats off and respectful careful not to let them brush the ground Now I know there are people out there constantly fret about the fabric of america violent videos nasty tv That sort of thing but it seems to me the fabric of america would be just fine if there's a little bit more of it in our mother's underpants That's the issue I will run on when I eventually run Getting our moms out of thongs and back into hammocks with leg holes the way God intended. Thank you