This is fine, smart radio, heady in the best sense. Through readings and conversation with the author, we enter the world of James Meek's novel about ideological extremists in the bleek landscape of Siberia. Meek has fresh and thought-provoking things to say about men and women (getting obsessed over abstractions tends to be a guy thing), about the American view of history post-9/11 (why should everybody assent that the world has changed because an awful act of violence struck Manhattan and Washington for a change as opposed to, say, Grozny?), and about the job of the fiction writer. Meek argues that what separates good novels from bad is not the quality of the writer's imagination but his or her willingness to tell the truth about human nature.

To Meek, that truth is as dark as a Siberian winter. The piece should come with a warning for the feint of heart in the audience. It includes a reading from the novel in which a character describes in careful, calm detail the slicing off of his penis by ideologues.