Bookworm

The Almost Moon (Little, Brown) Alice Sebold wrote The Lovely Bones , one of the most beloved and lovable books in recent years. How did she prepare herself for the onslaught she'll face with The Almost Moon , a book which, for all its quality, is resolutely in the realm of unlovability.

The Guardians (Random House) This is a novel about borders in which borders disappear: the border between old and young, between secular and sacred, between states—but not the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

Spook Country (Putnam) Along with the most sophisticated future-predictions, speculations about the sociology of cities, and adventures in virtual post-realities, William Gibson has finally learned how to get his characters from one room to another.

Das Kapital: A Novel of Love and Money Markets (Simon & Schuster) Viken Berberian writes in a post-modern apocalyptic vein about billionaire stock traders, terrorists and nationalists.  

The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster) With its fascinating combination of history, biography, memoir and essay, is The Shadow Catcher a novel?

No one belongs here more than you and Learning to Love You More , co-author Harrell Fletcher (Prestel) Miranda July 's film Me and You and Everyone We Know captured the mood of a generation –- and its attention. In this first book of stories, we find the same fear of paralysis, the same narcotized, sleepwalker affect. Why does Miranda July, a tireless whirlwind, identify with these listless charac...

The Ministry of Special Cases (Knopf) Nathan Englander uses desapareacidos to stand for all kinds of disappearance. Here, we focus on yet another: his own.

The Perfect Man (Random House) Naeem Murr 's work has been described as perverse—but he insists that this perversity seems ordinary to him.

Michael Ondaatje 's novels come together through obsession and intuition. He works in the dark, not knowing where he is heading, juxtaposing disparate materials, noticing echoes and recurrences.

Their Dogs Came with Them (Atria) Helena Maria Viramontes has written about L.A.-based Latino culture before -- but who could have expected this epic work about a neighborhood that is divided by a freeway, cut off and lost in Los Angeles. Viramontes explores the explosive insights that gave her the ability to grow as a novelist.

A Man without a Country (7 Stories) The late Kurt Vonnegut has been astonishing us sincethe 1960's.  Here, in the rebroadcast of a 2006 interview, he speaks as a socialist disappointed by human behavior, our country and our times. He "wants to go home. (This interview will be not be heard on KCRW as it will be pre-empted by our semi-annual subscription drive.)

The  Almost Moon (Little Brown) Alice Sebold ( The Lovely Bones ) gives a sneak preview of her new novel, coming out this fall...

The Unknown Terrorist (Grove) Richard Flanagan felt that his last novel, Gould's Book of Fish , widely acclaimed a masterpiece, had burnt him out. Here, he discusses the things he did to reenergize.

The Pesthouse (Doubleday) Jim Crace makes lies masquerade as truth in this post-apocalyptic tale of toxified America.

You Don't Love Me Yet (Doubleday) The pleasures of the lightweight and the free-spirited.

The Inheritance of Loss (Grove) Booker Prize-winner Kiran Desai says she prefers "messiness" to perfection--it's more human, and it fits her subject better.

Can a novelist uncover a secret?

Haunted House (Ashbery); Prose Poems (Padgett) (both from Black Square Editions) The haunted, lonely prose-poetry of Pierre Reverdy has attracted many translators. Two of America's most extraordinary poets read and discuss their translations...

Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Lydia Davis writes elegant prose pieces in which basic confusions are described with authority and clarity.

Everybody Loves Somebody (Back Bay Books) Joanna Scott claims her collection of stories is a history of love, from World War I to the present.

Oates's most autobiographical novel and the culmination of her career-long themes and obsessions.

A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer (Harcourt) Prose impressionist Christine Schutt describes the painstaking intensity that allows her to perfect her cadences and the precision of her imagery. Her stories are built up draft upon draft, variation upon variation, until Schutt achieves a density that is both poetic and conclusive.

Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville has written the first in a series of thrillers, and he's even taken on an alias or, at least, a nom de plume .

A Worldly Country (Ecco) In this landmark conversation, John Ashbery talks about his fascination with nonsense and fantasy, beginning with Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Those books involve incomprehension, parody and an extreme use of non sequitur--qualities that for Ashbery define the way we live now.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press) The design and composition of this five hundred page picture book took Brian Selznick many years' work. Here, we talk about the influence of movies, especially French movies, especially the work of pioneer Georges Méliès. The talk about Méliès leads us to the spiritual mentors that haunt Selznick's vivid imagination.