Bookworm

Lydia Millet's new novel is fast-moving and funny -- except when it isn't. 

Colm Tóibín discusses his deeply personal story of a provincial Irishwoman who sets aside motherhood to grapple with grief. 

What is a Splash state? Poet Todd Colby tells us a splash state is the golden moment when his writing hits its ecstatic stride. 

Iranian author Goli Taraghi's recent collection translates many of her short stories of the past forty years into English for the first time.

Bookworm is joined by Marilynne Robinson to discuss Lila ( Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), the latest in a series of novels set in the backdrop of the dustbowl years. 

Acclaimed novelist Martin Amis returns to discuss The Zone of Interest, a mordant exploration of love in a place that is meant  to crush the soul in a concentration camp. 

A conversation about the artist Jess and poet Robert Duncan who were the center of an underground art scene in San Francisco.

What makes a good kid’s book?

Ben Lerner is a novelist/poet who writes about the way we live now, which is not the way we used to live.

The title of Waters’ new novel is a euphemism for “lodgers,” here used by the protagonist’s family to mask the shame of taking on tenants following WWII.

Darnielle titled his novel after a back-masked message in Larry Norman’s song “Six Sixty Six.” He reflects on our desire to locate meaning where there might be none.

Unlike Coe’s other comedic novels, here the humor has a nostalgic feel, reminiscent of 1950s British films like Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes .

Mitchell’s new novel follows his protagonist from 1984-2040; he reflects on mortality in a world that doesn’t much smile upon the aging process.

This is the third in a trilogy of graphic novels by Burns in which the seemingly normal happenings of his protagonist Doug's life take an unsettling Freudian turn.

Landis’ novel, a series of chronological short-stories, follows the lives of three vulnerable, precocious girls as they pass through adolescence in 1970s New York.

Flanagan’s Booker-nominated novel, titled after a travelogue written by 17 th  century Japanese poet Basho, follows the building of the Burma-Siam Railway during WWII.

Our discussion of this anthology, written by incarcerated men and women, divides between the shocking realism of the stories and Oates’ experience as editor of the collection.

Antrim’s collection of stories stems from his own experience with psychosis; we all have our turn in the barrel, he notes, and sometimes you're really turned upside down.

What exactly made Ulysses so dangerous? Like an eye into the future, this difficult, all-consuming book still seems radical almost a century after its publication.

Kevin Birmingham delves into the history of censorship surrounding the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses for its seemingly seditious, immoral content.

William T. Vollmann has authored a wide array of works of nonfiction as well as fiction. Who is this literary chameleon, and where is his life’s work going?

Vollmann leads us to the “wall of ill” that separates life from death. We dissect Vollmann’s opening remarks to the reader, brimful of images both dark and sweet.

Tillman says a writer shouldn’t be ahead of one’s time but ‘of’ one’s time. She wishes to open doors, break down barriers, and make us aware of how thoughts are formed.

St. Aubyn’s novel parodies the upsurge of interest in literary prizes: what do these prizes have to do with literature, and are the books that win ones we should read?

Prose’s protagonist, Lou Villars, is based on the athlete and Gestapo interrogator Violette Morris, who was photographed with her lover in a Parisian nightclub in 1932.