Bookworm

From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Coach House) When the emerging avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin published his journals, the connection between his life and his wacky operatic visionary movies was bound to come out....

With solemnity, grace and a little defensiveness, this Grand Old Man of Letters reads, discusses and defends his choices...

Now Is the Time to Open Your Hear t (Random House) She's at it again! This time, Alice Walker takes to the rain forest for the most-recent leg of her spiritual journey. We meet shamans, visit Hawaiian grief circles, and learn the secrets of ethno-botany...

Trouble in Mind: Poems (Knopf) The ecstatic and ghoulish poetry of Lucie Brock-Broido is stitched together from fragments of poetic history. In this case, she writes a whole suite of poems from titles that Wallace Stevens listed in a notebook but never used. How does she arrive at her very original voice when quotation and appropriation are her constant strategies?

The hero of The Confessions of Max Tivoli  is born an old man who ages backwards -- not an unusual fantasy premise.

Melissa Pritchard's Late Bloomer is funny. She's taken her ongoing interest in creativity and transformation, and placed it in counterpoint to a lively parody of New Age spirituality. New questions arise...

The Dew Breaker (Knopf) What happens when a Haitian "dew breaker" (torturer) moves to America and conceals his identity? In this collection of interrelated stories, Edwidge Danticat explores the twin legacies of torture and secrecy...

GraceLand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) In Chris Abani 's GraceLand , a teenage Elvis-impersonator in Lagos, Nigeria lives in poverty as he pursues an American pop-culture dream of success....

The Face (Harper Collins) Rapid tonal shifts, teetering rhetorical mixtures of irony and self-pity, and overwhelming instability characterize David St. John 's The Face, a novella in verse ...

Kindred (Beacon) Although Octavia Butler was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (-genius- grant-) in 1995 because of her science fiction, she does not consider her breakthrough novel, Kindred, to be sci-fi. Indeed, Butler celebrates the 25th anniversary of that book with a review of the many paradoxes that surround her work: contradictions and reversals that have placed her among the distinguished lit...

Headless (Little House on the Bowery/Akashic Books) Dennis Cooper is editing a new-fiction series for Akashic Books. Benjamin Weissman 's Headless is one of the first of the new releases. Together, writer and editor discuss the poles of Weissman's work...

Doris Lessing , one of our most sage and canny living writers discusses the real stories behind her fiction....

American Smooth (Norton) When her house burned down, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove decided to learn formal ballroom dancing...

Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan) An exploration of Upper Paleolithic cave painting leads poet Clayton Eshleman to this meditation about hell and rebirth. This book, in poetry, prose and picture, marks the culmination of a thirty-year investigation of Pre-history.

Although camouflaged as a social history, James McCourt 's " Queer Street" is a memoir of sexual initiation and awareness...

The Fifth Book of Peace (Knopf) A fire at home destroys her manuscript and reminds Maxine Hong Kingston of the firebombing of Vietnam. She extends the analogy of private loss and public tragedy to arrive at a novel whose purpose is to promote personal serenity and global peace.

I Sailed with Magellan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Dream and reality are side by side in Stuart Dybek 's short stories--but with a twist. As the sexual dreams of his adolescent characters are shaped by reality, those characters are transformed...

Old School (Knopf) This conversation illustrates the care Tobias Wolff takes with narrative revelation: every step reveals character, each twist and turn provides a clue to the nature of the mysteriously disagreeable man who narrates this first novel by master storyteller Wolff.

Love (Knopf) Nobel laureate Toni Morrison shows how the careful arrangement of specific detail in her newest fiction, Love , forces the reader to participate in its structure.

Mr. Paradise (Morrow) Raffish characters, extreme events and lewd jokes are signatures of the widely praised Elmore Leonard style....

American Woman (Harper Collins) The critics loved Susan Choi's novelization of the Patty Hearst saga, but they barely mention the book's center, told from the point of view of the Asian-American woman who helped hide Hearst and her kidnapper comrades...

The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin) Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story writer Jhumpa Lahiri defines her beliefs about writing: directness, simplicity, reality and emotional truth are her guideposts. How appropriate then that India-born Gogol, the hero of this new novel, should want to change his name....

Edmund White turns himself into Mrs. Trollope, the Victorian traveler who, in her last year, narrates a biography of her scandalous friend, the feminist Fanny Wright....

Vernon God Little (Canongate) DBC Pierre (the dark horse underdog who surprised the literary world by winning the 2003 Booker Prize) divulges the hidden workings of his rebellious Columbine-inspired novel: His narrator, a disguised St. Peter, retells Christ's story, using a uniquely profane American vernacular.

This interview, originally broadcast on March 5, 1998, will not be heard on KCRW so that we may present special holiday programming.