SIMON: Well, help us understand the play of his mind as thoughts run through them - to use your words again - loping along in odd repetitive chunks, running at him, stumbling.
And he - as a work in progress, he eventually landed himself in 1995. And I was preoccupied with him in a medieval context and then in a Victorian context. Through him would pour the dead and the living as well as the human and the nonhuman, and I wondered how he would react to being an unhappy teenager in the so-called real world. But this specific boy rose up out of a kind of dream I'd had about a boy who was see-through, who was porous. PORTER: Well, he's there already 'cause I'm raising three sons, and I do a lot of mentoring with young people, and I'm watching the way this country is working and what its deciding to do with its vulnerable population and what it's deciding to do with inequality as a pressing issue. SIMON: How did this character of Shy worm his way into your mind and heart? SIMON: Max Porter, author of "Grief Is The Thing With Feathers" and other novels that have been translated into more than 30 languages, joins us now from Bath, England. Psychologically disturbed juveniles requiring special educational treatment? Or a bunch of teenage criminals on a taxpayer-funded countryside retreat? He's sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad's finger.
MAX PORTER: (Reading) His heart is bump, bump, bumping like he's scared.
Let's ask Max Porter to read what runs through the mind of the character he's created. Shy, a troubled British teen in the mid-1990s, has been sent to the Last Chance boarding school and has loaded his rucksack in the middle of the night to break out of his dorm and escape the bunk beds, the therapy groups and the counseling sessions. "Shy" by Max Porter is a short, fierce novel that can be a rant, a rumination, a reveal - blank verse and blunt talk.
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