Bookworm

J. D. McClatchy has traveled the US visiting the homes of classic American writers. Joan Didion talks about her native California; Jonathan Lethem describes growing up in Brooklyn; and Toni Morrison describes the creation of an imaginary home, a hotel, in her most-recent novel. 

We hear from E. L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer , but the focus is on Russell Banks , a white, male, American writer, who started his career in a specific part of the world, the American Northeast. He has explored identity throughout his career, using it as a narrative tool. He believes that good writing transcends the mythology of identity....

Russell Banks, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Camille Paglia, Stephen Greenblatt, Tom Wolfe and David Mitchell In the first of this 10-part series, Escaping the Cage: Identity, Multiculturalism and Writing , we sample the range of attitudes toward identity, identity politics and multiculturalism. Among the highlights: Angelou describes an emotional encounter with Tupac Shakur, Sontag rejects self-exp...

American Linden (Tupelo) Your Time Has Come (Verse) Poets Matthew Zapruder and Joshua Beckman discuss the formation of a new literary press, Wave, and then branch out into an exploration of the improbable economics of life as a poet....

The young Jonathan Safran Foer (28) offers an even younger narrator (9) whose father died in the bombing of the World Trade Center.

Jubilant Thicket: new and selected poems (Copper Canyon) Jonathan Williams alternates between playing the role of elder statesman and that of rambunctious old cuss. You can hear it in his poetry...

Saturday (Doubleday) Ian McEwan 's first book since his stunning Atonement , is one of the first novels written in response to 9/11 and worldwide threats of terrorism. It explores of the forces of order and chaos that shape contemporary society....

K. (Knopf) Roberto Calasso--scholar, publisher, polymath--delves into the works of Franz Kafka more deeply than anyone ever has. In this conversation, we explore the demonic and metaphysical elements of Kafka's world. Calasso describes one of the happier interludes in Kafka's life, in the process adding new dimensions to the word -Kafka-esque.-

In Lunar Follies (Coffee House), one of his genre-defying extravaganzas, Gilbert Sorrentino describes outlandish art shows, all of them taking place in galleries named for mountain ranges and craters of the moon...

We explore the hallucinatory intensity of Steve Erickson 's visionary novel born out of the anxiety provoked by the imagined loss of a child....

The Fall of Heartless Horse by Martha Kinney (Akashic); Grab Bag by Derek McCormack (Akashic) Two young writers and their editor tell about their new books for a new publishing house: McKinney , in the style of a Scottish border ballad, chronicles the fall of a suburban family, while McCormack employs wicked understatement to celebrate a depraved childhood...

Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (Pantheon) 
 Firebrand Paglia devotes her energies to a vibrant demonstration of how to read poetry, attacking the theorists who've made understanding a poem preposterously complex, and passionately defending the poems she's chosen that represent poetry at its greatest.... 

Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) In the second part of our conversation, we explore the historical and social forces that shape Marilynne Robinson's narrator, John Ames, and, by extension, the Protestant Church...

Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) The loveliness of life, life itself as a blessing, is the subject of Marilynne Robinson 's beautiful book. In this first of a two-part conversation, we discuss her narrator, a preacher, and his troubled relations with the world and the people around him.

A wizard of a storyteller, Greenblatt combines prodigious historical research and encyclopedic knowledge to conjure a vision of life and love in Elizabethan England.

Heir to the Glimmering World (Houghton Mifflin) Eccentric and beautiful, Cynthia Ozick 's novel is about an immigrant family's attempts to preserve a dying esoteric tradition....

The Pacific and Other Stories (Penguin) Mark Helprin 's critics--who mainly regard him as a political conservative and, therefore, a traitor to imaginative literature--have made him into a martyr. Here, he fends off the slings and arrows to say what he believes a writer to be, and describes the values he wants his work to embrace.

Joy Williams, specialist in what should be called sorrowful hilarity, reads from her work Honored Guest . Pretty soon we discover that what we would call a sacrificial victim, she calls an honored guest...

How We Are Hungry: Stories (McSweeney-s) Dave Eggers begins by describing his book as an object (it-s designed to look like a Moleskine Journal). From there, we jump to the idea of stories as entries, improvs, breaking the rules as they go. Then, of course, we go on to influences Monty Python, Donald Barthelme, and, and, and...

The Volcano Lover Novelist, essayist and driving intellectual force, Susan Sontag , died late last year. In her memory, we offer this conversation, first broadcast in October 1992. On this first visit to Bookworm, she spoke with great enthusiasm about her novel, The Volcano Lover and how she came to write -- of all things -- a romance.

Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) A a single, perfectly placed phrase brings an essay about the death of August Kleinzahler's brother to a heart-breaking, unforgettable conclusion...

The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury) Allan Hollinghurst-s Booker Prize-winning novel pits the aesthetic sensibility against the deprivations of Margaret Thatcher-s London-here seen as the protagonist-s largely frustrated war against ingrained social gay-bashing.

The more closely you investigate Russell Banks ' powerful new novel, The Darling , the stranger it becomes. Set in Liberia, it explores its heroine's narcissistic wound....

Snow (Knopf) Turkey's preeminent novelist, Orhan Pamuk , has decided to write a political novel-without a political agenda. The result resembles -- but not quite -- the great metaphysical novels he's written previously...

The Stone Fields (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Courtney Angela Brkic recruited her forensic skills to help exhume and identity bodies from besieged villages in Bosnia. She is American born, of Serbo-Croatian lineage. This conversation, then, is about the pain of ancestral memory and the consequences of direct contact with the dead.