Bookworm

The Gathering (Grove) In Anne Enright 's Booker Prize-winning novel about a family wake, the narrator remembers, lies, invents and imagines with equal ardor.

The Jewish Messiah (Penguin) Unsettling, profane and goofy, Arnon Grunberg ’s novel takes politically incorrect risks with contemporary Jewish culture.

Riding toward Everywhere (Ecco) William Vollmann decided to spend as much time as possible viewing the stars from the flatbed of a moving train. He’s a “fauxbo” not a hobo, and he movingly describes his need to find freedom by hopping a train–without any destination in mind.

Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir (Simon & Schuster) David Rieff accompanied his mother, Susan Sontag, through the medical ordeals that led to her death. We explore the death of this great writer, a woman who resisted consolation and maintained—to her last days—an enormous appetite for life.

People of the Book (Viking) The art of detection unravels the secrets of the Sarajevo Haggadah. What does the miraculous survival of this medieval codex tell us about the survival of both culture and history?

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (Vintage) How does the creative person function in a market culture? In the 25 years since The Gift was first published, this question has become increasingly more difficult to answer.

Sorry, Tree (Wave Books) and Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press) and Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press) Critic David Lehman has called the New York School of Poetry "the Last Avant Garde." Poet and critic Maggie Nelson suggests it might better be considered "one of the first gay avant gardes," since its original members included Frank O'H...

Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005 (Ecco) If it can still be said that a poet can have a humanizing influence on his culture, Robert Hass is such a poet. Here, as we discuss the poems in his National Book Award-winning collection, the beautiful, moving humanity of Hass' voice emerges, making us wish we were better people.

Lost Paradise (Grove) In this duel of interpretations, Dutch writer Nooteboom (who has been repeatedly shortlisted for the Nobel Prize) shows the whipper-snapper Michael Silverblatt that there are simpler, clearer, realer reasons for the angels in Lost Paradise than the over-interpreting Silverblatt wants to believe.

Oliver Sacks explores the brain's affinity for music by examining the extraordinary ways our brains adapt in response to musical aberrations. 

The Reserve (Harper) Russell Banks , one of the great living American novelists, uses the 1930's novel of passion and betrayal -- with its allied seductions, madness, and adultery -- to explore America's class system; the relationships between art, politics and wealth; and the despoiling of the American Landscape. (An abridged version of this interview will be heard live on KCRW due to our semi-an...

Did Stephen Crane attempt to write a gay companion piece to his Maggie: A Girl of the Streets ? Literary rumor says he tried. At any rate, now Edmund White has written it for him. 

This big, hilarious and joyful book has been twenty-five years in the making. Fran Lebowitz called it "The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization set to music."

ABC (Pantheon) In this novel, a series of unlinked personal, familial and global catastrophes leads unrelated victims to search for order. Mysteriously, the "order" they discover is alphabetical order. So many cultures begin their alphabets with ABC. Why? What revelation is concealed in the alphabet's code?

The family in Ann Patchett 's Run unites rich with poor, black with white. The novel is a thriller—but the mystery at its heart is the mystery of spiritual grace...

This conversation provides a mini-course in short-story writing, George Saunders-style and explores the construction of short fiction from the ground up.

Channeling Mark Twain (Random House) This novel revives the belief that poetry has a close connection to personal and political liberation.

Steve Erickson 's breakthrough novel Zeroville is about the The Movies — not the movie business, not the wheels and deals— but The Movies themselves.

The Bad Girl (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) We take the occasion of the publication of Mario Vargas Llosa 's new novel, The Bad Girl , to air this previously unheard interview in which the great Peruvian novelist describes the effects of "El Boom" –- magic realism and its relatives -- on the literature of Latin America...

Bowl of Cherries (McSweeney's) Millard Kaufman has written a classic comic novel that belongs in the tradition that runs from Charles Dickens to Evelyn Waugh.

Joe is Ron Padgett 's intimate and affectionate biography-memoir of his friend of four decades, artist-poet Joe Brainard.

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (Norton) Biblical scholar Robert Alter faces a barrage of questions: What are psalms? Who wrote them? If they are prayers, why does he consider them poems?

This wide-ranging yet intimate conversation with Junot Díaz explores many difficult subjects...

twin time: or how death befell me (Semiotext(e)) The heroine of twin time is a woman whose life is surrounded by mystery. Who is her father? Where is her mother? Why did no one tell her she has a twin brother?

Death of a Murderer (Knopf) A factual series of murders provides the background for this novel: the Moor Murders that haunted the British imagination in the 1960's.