Bookworm

A Child Again (McSweeney's) Robert Coover, a reigning master of experimental narrative, gives a two-part interview for this, his long-anticipated first visit to Bookworm. In part one, Coover offers an overview of his career, revealing that even from the first his themes, intentions and methods were fully imagined. He then worked on these retold fairy tales and comic political allegories sometimes...

Little Nemo in Slumberland: Splendid Sundays 1905-1910 (Sunday Press) A celebration of the great Winsor McCay's Sunday funnies! Why? Because Nemo in Slumberland has been printed in its original full-color and actual size for the very first time!

The Complexities of Intimacy (Coffee House) The very contrary Mary Caponegro doesn't write or think like anyone else. She is a complete original. In the course of this interview, the snowballing perplexities of fusing logic and madness emerge with great force. Each of her stories is a triumph against nearly insuperable odds--but what a triumph! This interview will not air on KCRW (as it will be pr...

Inner Voices: selected poems 1963-2003 ; Paper Trail: selected prose 1965-2003 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Richard Howard 's extraordinary urbanity and sophistication are evident as he explores his influences: Henry James' winding syntax, Proust's evocation of a lost past, Whitman's teeming democracies....

Shalimar the Clown (Random House) Although the history of Kashmir provides the backdrop of Salman Rushdie 's new novel, it is a larger-than-life romance with larger-than-life characters--a version of Romeo and Juliet and the Ramayana. In this conversation, he describes the ways in which an historical conflict can determine the course of love.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf) Two novel-lovers share their deep passions for reading. Jane loves the realists; Michael the Bookworm loves the inventors. But more than anything, they love "a lengthy written narrative with a protagonist" the novel.

Pax Atomica: poems (Ecco) Campbell McGrath has figured out how to perform a wonderful trick: he writes ecstatic comic poetry about the decline of America...

Trance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Christopher Sorrentino takes the Patty Hearst saga as the springboard for an exploration of the mass hypnosis of American culture. This novel about inter-generational warfare is written by the son of formidable avante-gardiste Gilbert Sorrentino.

Joyce Carol Oates says this novel was written as a tribute to her mother, who died last year. Clearer, simpler, less literary than Oates' other books, it was meant to be a novel her mother would have enjoyed....

The author of The Very Persistent Gappers of Fripp decided he'd try to write another satire-fantasy.

The Master (Scribner) The winner of this year's Los Angeles Times award for fiction reveals the difficulties of writing about the life of Henry James...

Them: A Memoir of Parents (The Penguin Press) After an affair with the great Russian poet Mayakovsky, Francine du Plessix Gray's mother married a man who became a kingpin in the Cond- Nast fashion magazine empire. All the high fashion and social elite of New York are discussed, but they pale beside the evocation of true genius. Mayakovsky and poetry triumph over commerce.

Louise Erdrich 's beautiful short novel emerged over a period of ten years, after an older story suddenly suggested deeper meanings...

Kazuo Ishiguro never tells more than he has to -- his stripped-down narratives are filled with absence and mystery. 

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (Believer Books) The controversial French writer on his early influence, H. P. Lovecraft, the American writer of classic horror fantasies. Houellebecq discusses their shared, essentially anti-human stance and then quietly, poignantly reveals his own pessimistic philosophy.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Harcourt) The loss of memory is Umberto Eco 's subject here. After a stroke, an antiquarian bookseller remembers every book he's read--but he remembers nothing about himself....

The History of Love: A Novel (Norton) Memory is the subject of many novels, but Nicole Krauss ' subject is the transmission of memory: how do you tell another person about the things that are no longer there?

Lunar Park (Knopf) Beginning as an autobiography, Lunar Park turns into a classic horror novel. The haunted house, however, is spooked by Bret Ellis- personal demons, and the past comes alive in creepy ways that go way beyond autobiography.

Maya Angelou believes that a writer who tells the truth can be read by anyone. James Baldwin, for example, can be enjoyed by black, white, Muslim or Jewish readers -- indeed by anyone who values reading the truth...  

Tom Wolfe discusses neuroscience and its view that there is no such thing as identity. Margaret Atwood talks about the coming threat to identity by cloning and genetic experimentation. Irish writer John Banville rails that identity does not exist.

Sandra Cisneros and Nina Marie Martínez The two Hispanic women explain how they've been put into the cage of multiculturalism, sometimes by the way they view themselves, but primarily by publishers and readers, to the extent of being expected to read only certain kinds of literature. When the names Thomas Pynchon and Marguerite Duras come up, the conversation takes a turn, and the satisfactions of...

Susan Choi, Maxine Hong Kingston and Don Lee American-born writers of Asian descent explore the challenge of forging identity, while living "between cultures."

James McCourt, Camille Paglia, Alan Hollinghurst and Edmund White James McCourt discusses the emergence of "queer identity" and gives an overview of French literary theories and their influence on multiculturalism, while Camille Paglia explains the destructive nature of such theories. Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst, who writes about the gay experience, reveals that he reads very little popu...

Cartoonist and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman explains how writers' identities are revealed in their work, that reading a book is like crawling into the writer's head. Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Rosen talk about the immigrant experience and the Jewish American novel...

Rita Dove, Edward P. Jones, Alice Walker and Jayne Cortez Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove reads her thrilling poem "Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove" and discusses black identity and American culture. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward P. Jones talks about the history of slavery; Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award-winner Alice Walker explains that writing must address a w...