Bookworm

Devotion (Houghton Mifflin) Betrayal and forgiveness are subjects here. Howard Norman 's signature melancholy pervades this exploration of romance, and he shows us how even people who are perfect for one another have a need to betray and forgive--but not forget, never forget.

Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) C.K. Williams ' Collected Poems covers a lifetime's concern with ethics and personal morality. As his work proceeds, he develops a quality of consciousness and empathy that some would describe as a soul. In this conversation, this accessible and plainspoken poet plumbs the depths, as we trace his concerns from poem to poem.

Sacred Games (Harper Collins) Gangsters, detectives, Bollywood movie stars-- Chandra mobilizes the machinery of a thriller in order to reveal Bombay at its most various. Fascinating then, to hear him describe his novel as a mandala of perceptions in which characters reflect the worlds they move through, the plot enacting the clash between different beliefs about reality.

The Castle in the Forest (Random House) In the second of this two-part conversation about the bureaucratic, dim-witted culture that characterized the German provinces of Hitler's childhood, Mailer reveals that his narrator, an assistant to the devil, is himself a bureaucrat. Bureaucracy becomes the model for the world of this novel, down to the smallest detail—the beehives kept by Hitler's father....

The Castle in the Forest (Random House) Now in his eighties, Norman Mailer has forsaken the violence and declarative sentences of his signature style for the gradual somber analytics of a style like that of Thomas Mann. In this first of a two-part interview, we discuss this unexpected change and his new novel's subject: the childhood of Adolf Hitler. 

Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (Ecco) Robert Stone has written novels that are said to be the best descriptions of the American 1960's. In this memoir, he travels back to revisit those troubled times...

Zoli (Random House) The Romani poet, Zoli, is the latest heroine in Colum McCann 's ongoing quest to understand the function of art.

House of Meetings (Knopf) Martin Amis has written a Russian novel--not just a Russian novel but a novel about the Gulags.

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (Ecco) The possibility that there are those who choose to escape or evade their identities enters our exploration of Vendela Vida 's quest-for-identity novel.

Point to Point Navigation (Doubleday) Using his recent memoir as springboard, Gore Vidal nimbly leaps from the history of prose narrative to the contemporary decline of culture in America.

Isabel Allende uncloaks Inés, a shrouded figure from the chronicles of Chilean history. She was a conquistadora , a conspirator--but also a healer.

Alice McDermott is a writer who believes in loading each facet of her work with resonance and significance, while composing an accessible, highly readable narrative.

The Open Curtain (Coffee House) The mystery at the heart of The Open Curtain derives from a violent, concealed episode in Morman history.

What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney's) Autobiography, epic, documentary, novel-- Dave Eggers explores the many facets of his protean new work.

The Stories of Mary Gordon (Pantheon) Mary Gordon makes distinctions. She writes only about characters who interest her, people she would be willing to meet and spend time with.

The Lay of the Land (Knopf) is Richard Ford's third novel about Frank Bascomb, his sportswriter-turned-realtor.

Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (New York Review Books) Anne Carson 's translations of four plays by Euripides are dynamic, intense and were written to be performed.

Breath (Knopf) Philip Levine reminisces about his childhood--about how a working class boy came to poetry.

The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) In this conversation about how America disappoints its prophets and betrays its promises, it's surprising to hear that Greil Marcus continues to maintain faith in the American dream and America's future. Whether the subject is "Twin Peak's" reflection of the Salem witch trials or the band Pere Ubu's rattle-t...

Jennifer Egan researched classic Gothic fiction to develop a style that would deepen the terrors at the core of her new novel...

Author Chris Adrian, a pediatrician and theologian, imagines a future in which a children's hospital becomes an ark that survives the flood at the end of the world...

All Aunt Hagar's Children (Amistad) Edward P. Jones ' magnificent new book of stories takes up characters from his earlier collection, Lost in the City . Minor, background characters become central; children unlearn the lessons of their parents; time somersaults; and legends become truth...

Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment presents a series of improvisations and responses to photography, particular photographs and ideas about photography...  

Winkie (Grove) After all this fiddle about souls and truth, finally a nice straightforward novel about a teddy bear who comes to life and is accused of terrorism. Chase talks about memory and childhood, as we explore the role toys play as they pass from generation to generation, and the way America was transformed as it moved from the racism of the fifties to the terrorism of today.

On Beauty (Penguin) Obliquely about On Beauty , this intense, abstract conversation is about what a novel is and how it represents a particular culture, and about what a culture is and how it can create the illusion of identity. The search for identity, Smith maintains, is a delusion. The search for beauty and truth depends upon destroying the lie of identity