Bookworm

Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Dalkey Archive)  This new anthology makes clear that magical realism is only a tiny segment of what’s been happening in Mexican fiction over the last half-century. In this conversation with its editor, Álvaro Uribe , and Cristina Rivera-Garza , one of the writers whose work appears in the book, we uncover a cavalcade of styles and influences, as well as a...

Road Show , a recording of the musical (Nonesuch, PS Classics) Stephen Sondheim is right — his new musical, Roadshow , is not gloomy. Sondheim and his collaborator, playwright John Weidman , discuss the many revisions of the musical that has evolved in an extraordinary way, and may yet become an American classic...

How to Sell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Clancy Martin 's first novel reads like a piece of sleaze, but it turns out — surprise! — to be a philosophical novel about the problems of appearance and reality...

Let the Great World Spin (Random House) Darkened by intimations of 9/11, Column McCann 's generous extravaganza of a novel brings together the lives of strangers who witness a high-wire artist dancing between the two World Trade Center towers...

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Penguin Press) Reif Larsen 's T. S. Spivet, twelve-year-old genius cartographer, compulsively maps everything...

Sunnyside (Knopf) What a charming raconteur Glen David Gold is, with his anecdotes about the movies, theories about identity and celebrity, and knowledge of World War I...

Eduardo Galeano has written a history of the world in brief chapters, each one devoted to an iconic incident...

Erased   (Tin House Books) In this wild and woolly conversation, Jim Krusoe reveals that his zany, unpredictable, hilarity-inspiring novels are, well, descriptions of the human condition (at least as how he sees it).

Manatee /Humanity (Penguin Poets) Anne Waldman guides us through this book-length poetry-and-prose meditation on endangered species by describing an initiation ceremony designed to instill a deeper sense of compassion....

Lowboy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) John Wray 's novel about a schizophrenic boy's quest for sex and/or love flirts violently with the thriller form...

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Wells Tower is the most talked-about new story writer to emerge on the literary scene. This conversation focuses on the weird details he uses to illuminate a mostly conventional narrative arc...

Modern Life (Graywolf Press) Like dangerous toys or perilous amusement park rides, Matthea Harvey 's poems careen into the unknown...

While we take a mini-tour of Flannery O'Connor's life and writing, biographer Brad Gooch describes his difficulties in gaining access to the author's inner life.

All-American Poem (American Poetry Review) Kate Tufts Discovery Award-winner Matthew Dickman writes emotional and accessible poetry...

Geoff Dyer on the secrets that structure his new novel (which might, on the surface, seem like two novellas)....

Don’t Cry (Pantheon) The extraordinary levels of empathy and sadness in Mary Gaitskill ’s new stories provide the basis for this intense discussion of the emotional subtexts of her fiction.

Jacques Roubaud, Ian Monk, Daniel Levin Becker, Marcel Bénabou, Anne F. Garréta and Hervé Le Tellier      When members of the Oulipo convened in New York, Bookworm was there to record this mini-anthology of the transcendentally witty, sometimes hilarious goings-on.

The Loop (Dalkey Archive) Jacques Roubaud describes the mesh of image and memory that makes up his fascinating, newly translated, unclassifiable book.

...on his translation of Pierre Martory's The Landscapist (The Sheep Meadow Press) As John Ashbery remembers his early years in Paris, he reflects on French poetry and about the very special case of his long-time friend, Pierre Martory .

Out of fantasias of the past (Fu Manchu novels, exotic Hollywood films, documents of "friendly" imperialism from the twenties to the forties), Gary Indiana concocts the nightmare present of The Shanghai Gesture ..

Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration (Graywolf); American Sublime (Graywolf) When Elizabeth Alexander presented Barack Obama's inaugural poem, few of us had considered that in the history of the United States there had been only three previous inaugural poets...

Warhorses: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) The extraordinary part of this interview is the opportunity to hear Komunyakaa 's voice as he reads his poetry. These poems are about love and war simultaneously, traumatic upheavals that may often be conjoined in this poet's vision of life.

Follow Me (Little, Brown) It has been said that life is like a river, and the river in this novel twists and turns, changes direction and may even be inhabited by river fairies...

Salvation Army (Semiotext(e)) In Abdellah Taïa 's family and in his native country, homosexuality is surrounded by silence. All sorts of behaviors are tolerated if they are not spoken of, an intolerable circumstance for a writer...

The Women (Viking) This richly layered conversation with T.C. Boyle centers on the subjects of art and arrogance. The Women is a biographical novel, a fiction derived from the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, focused particularly on Wright's up-and-down experiences with women.