Bookworm

The Return of the Player (Grove) In this conversation, the subject of the immorality of Hollywood gives way to the subject of the immorality of wealth, which in turn, surprisingly, gives way to the question of whether the soul exists. If the soul does not exist, is there any immorality? Do fictional characters have souls? Gradually we uncover the moral equations underlying Tolkin's universe.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics: A Novel (Viking) While Marisha Pessl 's first novel has a bright and witty narrative voice, it has mysterious depths and a hidden Nabokovian counterstructure. We explore the author's ambitions and her decision to keep the book's secrets well-hidden.

Grief (Hyperion) Andrew Holleran has written a beautiful, somber novella about loss. His narrator has come to Washington, D.C. to teach a course about AIDS literature. He is grieving the death of his mother and finds solace in the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln....  

Chris Kraus takes her aim at the traditional bourgeois novel about marriage and family and delivers a book full of bullet-holes... What is left standing?

Only Revolutions (Pantheon) There’s no mistaking a novel by Mark Danielewski for any other. This new one can be read forward, backward and upside down. It has multi-colored inks; two sewn-in bookmarks (green and gold); and a circular structure. Here, we explore how the book’s design reflects the joy-ride/killing spree of its two perpetual teenagers as they careen through time and space.

You Must Set Forth at Dawn (Random House) Nobel Prize-winning African playwright Wole Soyinka explores the myths of exile and return that underlie his most recent memoir. He contrasts European and African cosmologies, and describes his passionate activism as a quest influence by the gods.

Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels (Everyman's Library) A New York Times poll indicated that John Updike 's quartet of Rabbit novels is one of the five most important achievements in fiction in the past quarter century.

Terrorist (Knopf) The subject of John Updike 's recent bestseller required that he contrast his own reliance on faith with the more violent faith of a young Islamic terrorist. This first of a two-part conversation explores the dark side of empathy and identification.

Frances Johnson (Clear Cut Press) Using the model of the "nurse romances" of the 1950's, Stacey Levine has concocted a small-town romance--with a difference. The undercurrents of sexuality, repression and gender uncertainty rise to create flood tides. We discuss the nightmarish emissions from the unconscious that rock this seemingly placid novel.

Present Company (Copper Canyon); Summer Doorways (Shoemaker and Hoard) For his first visit to Bookworm, the eminent American poet, W. S. Merwin , explores the sequence of odes in which he addresses everything from inanimate objects to his own soul...

Beasts of No Nation (Harper Collins) Forcing himself to inhabit the terrifying heart of amorality and violence, Uzodinma Iweala has created the first-person voice of a child-soldier.

Big Fat Little Lit (Puffin) Back by popular demand! Editors Spiegelman and Mouly talk about how they recruited and supervised the many artists and writers who created these "comics for kids..."

The Eagle's Throne Carlos Fuentes casts a satiric eye on Mexican politics and, by extension, on global politics, skewering the art of politics in its entirety...

When you've written as many stories as Joyce Carol Oates, the process of choosing just sixty of them for an omnibus is daunting. Here, Oates explores those choices...

Talk Talk (Viking) When T. C. Boyle sits down to write a thriller, none of the usual rules apply. He starts with a young deaf woman, a computer animator and an identity thief and creates a novel about communication. We explore some of the buried connections that take him beyond the thriller form into an exploration of the things that keep human identity intact.

Black Swan Green (Random House) David Mitchell , one of the younger generation of British writers, provides a jolt of energy to the coming-of-age novel. First off, this novel ends just when the rite-of-passage traditionally begins...

Collected Poems: 1954-2004 (Schocken) During our conversation, Irving Feldman talks about everything from religion to cannibalism, from poetic diction to the structure of families. This intense discussion explores the poet's imagination and convictions, while revealing his passionate intellect.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Alice Quinn , the poetry editor of the New Yorker, assembled this volume of drafts and fragments from Elizabeth Bishop's notebooks and archives. The result is an extraordinary free association about Bishop: her childhood, her sexuality, h...

Paradiso Diaspora (Penguin)In a searching inquiry into the language of poetry, John Yau talks about avoiding autobiography while creating poetry that reflects his Chinese-American background--the influence of what he calls "Ing Grish." We explore the evolution of a dream language that is, in itself, an aesthetic of diaspora.

Book of Longing (Ecco) Leonard Cohen talks about his early years as a poet in Montreal; his novel, Beautiful Losers ; his songs; and now, ten years since his last book and fifty years since his first, the vicissitudes and recoveries that led to the art, lyrics and poems in his new Book of Longing .  

Here They Come (McSweeney's) Memory, instinct and aesthetics combine to recreate childhood in Yannick Murphy 's new novel...

David Foster Wallace insists on a conversation where what can be said must be said honestly (along with a sidebar defining honesty), sincerely (ditto defining sincerity), and with full consideration of how media affect honesty and sincerity (ditto media). Given these requirements, we discuss Wallace's new collection of essays with an eye to how he attempts the nearly impossible task of telling the...

The Life of David (Schocken)Robert Pinsky, a former poet-laureate, writes a biography-tribute to the Biblical King David, the poet warrior. Our conversation circles the subject of heroism as it is manifested in the contradictory character of King David--the most paradoxical figure in the Old Testament.

Petroleum Man (Overlook) In Stanley Crawford 's satire of corporate greed, a "gas-guzzling" super-magnate writes a loving description of every car he has ever owned. What is more, he intends to leave this chronicle of automotive ownership to his (largely indifferent) grandchildren...

A Child Again (McSweeney's) In part two of the interview, Coover lays bare the illusions and delusions that his stories about childhood and growth are meant to dispel. He reads from a story about Puff, the dragon, and speculates about how older knights slay the dragons of their later years.