Bookworm

The Last Novel (Shoemaker & Hoard) David Markson has invented his own "personal genre." His novels present collaged panoramas of the travails of art and artists—the bad reviews, the rivalries, the life-long neglect, the impoverished deaths. His juxtapositions can be comic or tragic.

Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 (Scribner) Annie Proulx 's new collection is a stew of tall tales, romantic sagebrush sagas, and genuinely affecting stories of survival on the range. * Language Advisory

Camille de Toledo : Coming of Age at the End of History (Soft Skull) The young French critic, novelist and filmmaker Camille de Toledo tells the sad /exuberant story of young French intellectuals growing up at the end of everything.

Sylvia Whitman , of Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore popular with Americans in Paris Francois Cusset French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (University of Minnesota Press) Our tour begins at Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore with a long tradition of helping American writers in Paris. Then, it's on to François Cusset and...

A tribute to the great (and virtually unknown) Swiss writer Robert Walser , who influenced Kafka and inspired Hermann Hesse. Writers  Susan Bernofsky , Deborah Eisenberg and Wayne Koestenbaum read, discuss and worship Walser, a writer who is like a mouse that roared—small and fragile but out-of-this-world outrageous

Editor of Toon Books Françoise Mouly describes the new children's books she's bringing into the world...

Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!   (Pantheon) A sneak preview of the new Art Spiegelman book, which collects Art's early underground commix and includes his next autobiographical sequence...

Knockemstiff (Doubleday) Knockemstiff, Ohio, inspires Donald Ray Pollock to explore the miseries and ferocities of small-town life.

A wonderful young novelist, Andrew Sean Greer , writes about enormous and basic truths that his characters choose to conceal...

In this new novel, Salman Rushdie explores Renaissance Florence and the reign of Akbar in India, in order to describe a world on the verge of discovering that all its beliefs are incorrect...

The Drop Edge of Yonder (Two Dollar Radio) Where has Rudy Wurlitzer been for the last fifteen years? The mental traveler takes another vision quest, this time into the Old American West...

Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (Knopf) Tobias Wolff has re-written his famous stories many times—even after they've been published...

Firefly under the Tongue: Selected Poems (New Directions) Coral Bracho , a major Mexican poet, writes ecstatic visionary poetry that has been translated into English for the first time. Our program marks another first—she has never before agreed to an interview...

Fall of Frost (Viking) Brian Hall takes on a fictional life of our great Robert Frost, giving language to the poet's inner life.

All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking) Keith Gessen , one of the founding editors of the hip, intellectual journal n+1, has written his first novel. It's about the struggles of young people to break into the world of their aspirations, in this case, the literary intelligentsia of New York City...

Sway (Little, Brown) Zachary Lazar 's novel is about the Rolling Stones, Charles Manson, Kenneth Anger and the dark side of the Sixties. In this conversation, we try to gauge how much "sympathy for the devil" the era generated—from sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll to satanic ritual murders.

Lush Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) This high-voltage interview with Richard Price (he spiels, riffs, and shoots off sparks) gives a rare insight into the way he orchestrates the complex of simultaneous perception in his writing. He proceeds with a strong sense of dread—ready for an attack from any and every direction.

Isabel Allende's second memoir is written to her daughter Paula who died. We discuss storytelling as a form of memory, a way of preserving the present.

An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (Black Widow Press) When The Bookworm explains that reading Eshleman 's intense and visceral work brings up initial feelings of disgust, Eschleman responds that his poetry is a matter of initiation and transformation.

Declension in the Village of Chung Luong (Ausable Press) and Brian Turner Here, Bullet (Alice James Books) Bruce Weigl is a poet who served in Vietnam. Brian Turner wrote poetry while serving in Iraq. Theirs is the poetry of war as written by on-site observers.

The thing about life is that one day you’ll be dead (Knopf) David Shields wrote this book to relieve his terrible fear of death. He compares this fear with his ninety-something-year-old father's vigor and confidence. Although the book is full of facts about aging and death, it has the odd effect of making you feel thrilled to be alive.

Girl Factory (Tin House) In Jim Krusoe 's strange and funny new novel, six women are being preserved in acidophilus in the basement of a frozen yogurt shop. The innocent hero's attempts to save these kidnapped beauties are disastrous.

His Illegal Self (Knopf) The excitement of Peter Carey 's new novel is rendered through a specific stylistic choice: He integrates two wildly different voices into the sentences, creating a vibrant stereo-effect. The result is amazing--the novel's action seems to be taking place about six inches from your face.

Coeur de Lion (Mal-o-mar); The Cow (Fence Books) This astonishing young poet—still in her twenties—is surely destined to be one of the crucial voices of her generation.

Colm Tóibín candidly describes the inspirations for the stories in his first collection. Sometimes a landscape is enough to trigger a story, sometimes an anecdote or a bit of family lore.