Bookworm

Over the course of his career, Edward Said produced compact and thrilling works that revolutionized the field of literary criticism. In his memory, Bookworm offers a conversation, first broadcast in 2002, in which Said talks about literature, critical theory, and exile.

Train (Doubleday)

The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday)

Where the Stress Falls (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Where does the stress fall in the life of a writer-intellectual? Susan Sontag examines the difference between exploring the interior of a subject and exploring the interior of the explorer...

Where I Was From (Knopf) Joan Didion takes deadly aim at the dream of California embodied, for example, in her own first novel, Run River . As she takes a more discerning look, she discovers even less innocence, less altruism than the early settlers could have imagined.

And Now You Can Go (Knopf) and How to Breathe Underwater  (Vintage)

Chuck Palahniuk takes on some rather aggressive questions about American culture and the artist...

Jelly Roll (a blues) (Knopf); Blues Poems (Everyman's Library) Kevin Young , who has edited a terrific anthology of blues poetry, uses blues traditions as the basis for his own recent work...

Gazelle (Knopf) Where will the magical Rikki Ducornet take us next? In Gazelle, the Arabian Nights recur, as a thirteen -year-old girl wanders in 1950's Cairo, reveling in the scents and exotic perfumes that lead to her unusual career as an anatomist of mummies. Ducornet leads us deeper into the realm of the senses than ever before. (Note: This interview will be pre-empted on KCRW by special progr...

The Dead Circus (Atlantic Monthly Press) John Kaye grew up in Los Angeles. His novel, The Dead Circus, is set in that city and delves beneath the surface of the classic L.A. noir thriller. What effect does all this dread and anomie have on the real people who actually live in the City of Angels?

Due Preparations for the Plague (Norton) Janette Turner Hospital's extraordinary fiction is beginning to gain recognition in America. Due Preparations for the Plague, a thrilling study of an airplane hijacking and its effects on the children of its victims, is overpowering in its intensity--generating terrifying imagery that will not easily be forgotten. In this conversation, Hospital explores how...

Heidi Julavits' first book was a bleak novel. Her second book's vision is lighter, but the subject remains dark: a terrorist training cell…

The Map of Love (Vintage) London-based author Ahdaf Soueif, praised as an "Egyptian George Eliot," describes the impact of middle-eastern and global history on her narratives....

The Romantic (Metropolitan) This very intimate interview focuses on the adolescent desire for magic in romance and the adult discovery that it may not exist. The author describes her own romantic arc and discloses that, both as a writer and as a lover, she depends entirely on intuition.

Booker Prize-winning author Yann Martel makes a distinction between the playful, surprise-filled surface of his novel and its spiritual purpose...

Relationships and marriage, violence and loss, houses and homes are the deeply conventional subjects that occupy this unconventional novel. In the second part of a two-part interview, Joseph McElroy shows how his oblique techniques evoke and mirror the emotional intricacies of our daily lives.

Joseph McElroy , one of the innovative masters of narrative, gives a rare two-part interview. This week, we talk about the way the novelist strives to represent the workings of consciousness, and the new techniques necessary to create a facsimile of the way memory is structured.

Sparrow (Random House) This collection of elegies for actor David Dukes, the poet's late husband, inspires a conversation about death, role-playing and ghosts. Most surprising, we discover an unexpected spectral visitation in one of the poems.

Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night (Harper Collins) A new Little Lit is always an event, and this one has work by the dreaded Lemony Snicket and a fabulous four-page Breughel-like phantasmagoria by the Where's Waldo? guy. This volume of comix for kids -- the third -- definitely does justice to its name!

Margaret Atwood on her nightmare novel about the biotechnological future...

What I Loved (Holt) A harrowing subject: the child of an artist giving way to crime, drugs and dishonesty. A harrowing conversation with author Siri Hustved : is the child's amorality genetic or did post-modern art corrupt him?

An unusually tender conversation with Alice McDermott about grace, imagined here as the act of putting others before oneself...

The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin) The Vietnamese cook in the famous Paris house of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas narrates Monique Truong 's first novel...

Bay of Souls (Houghton Mifflin) Robert Stone 's novel that features intrigue, romance, violence and voodoo...