Bookworm

Good Faith (Knopf) An ebullient book about fraud and deception-the eighties, Jane Smiley -style.

Cosmopolis (Scribner's) and The Body Artist (Scribner's) In this, the second of a two-part interview, Don DeLillo explores his most enigmatic creation: the weird gnome at the heart of his last novel, The Body Artist .

The deadpan master of post-modern dysfunction-comedy takes an ordinary New York traffic jam and transforms it into a funeral procession that guides his protagonist to defeat and death. 

A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (Harper Collins) A young doctor who has worked in developing countries, John Murray has written a collection of stories in which chaos and order wrestle for domination...

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin-s) Kate Moses attempts and achieves the impossible: she weaves Sylvia Plath-s imagery and intensity into an interior landscape illuminating the last week of the great poet-s life. In the process, Moses creates a convincing portrait of a hypothetical Plath-one who has earned a mastery of her demons and a place in the Pantheon.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead) With her extraordinarily confident language, newcomer ZZ Packer confronts issues of race, class and education that have flummoxed more-experienced writers...

The Hazards of Good Breeding (Norton) Jessica Shattuck skewers the narrow-minded prejudices of the Boston aristocracy. How did Shattuck, the daughter of a liberal lawyer and niece of a prominent literary critic, find the tenderness and insight necessary to give her characters human depth?

This remarkable anthology presents a picture of what the American essay is, and what, with any luck, it may become.   

Pattern Recognition (Putnam) William Gibson , the inventor of cyber-punk, says that his new novel, though set in the future, is realistic...

The Spooky Art (Random House) Norman Mailer , the lion at eighty, stayed lair-bound long enough to assemble this collection of his thoughts about writing..

For the first time, Louise Erdrich writes about the European side of her heritage. Her new novel is about the confrontation of German and Native American cultures in North Dakota between World Wars...

I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company (Viking) Brian Hall-s novel of Lewis and Clark turns the extraordinary expedition upside down to find its dark underside-the ignorance, racism and despair at the heart of the American wilderness adventure.

A Whistling Woman (Knopf) In the second of this two-part interview, Dame Byatt talks about the interaction of chance and design in her newly completed quartet.

A Whistling Woman (Knopf) Dame Antonia Byatt began a quartet of novels twenty years ago with The Virgin in the Garden . She completes this huge project with A Whistling Woman .

A wild and beautiful writer, Geoff Dyer goes to Rome where he "basically did nothing all day"....

Dancer (Metropolitan) Colum McCann deserts the working-class backgrounds of his Irish novels to write a fictional life of Rudolph Nureyev. He invents a dancing prose style-floating, glittering, suspended in bright air. We discover how the subject, Nureyev, taught McCann a new way to write.

The nightmare continues. After the success of Last Exit to Brooklyn , Selby pursues his bleak vision in Waiting Period ...

In the first of a two-part interview, Hubert Selby, Jr , now in his seventies, reviews and relives the tumult created by his debut novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn .

Ron Padgett tells the story of three writers who traveled from Tulsa to Manhattan and became the leaders of the second generation of the New York School of Poetry.

Jeffrey Eugenides ' multi-generational novel in which a Greek-American family, replete with elements of Greek tragedy (incest, hermaphroditism), witnesses American history.

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Pantheon) In a special edition of Bookworm, Art (Maus) Spiegelman joins us to introduce Kim Deitch, -one of the best kept secrets in comics for over 35 years.- Deitch-s graphic novel is a double extravaganza-a comic about the making of animated cartoons.

In this edgy conversation, author Jonathan Franzen and his interviewer take positions, argue, reverse positions and start again...

Tell Me (Counterpoint); Why Did I Ever (Counterpoint) Mary Robison returns to her student days of writing stories for John Barth's workshop, and the days of being edited by Roger Angell, for The New Yorker, and by Gordon Lish, for book publication at Knopf. These teachers and editors both shaped and thwarted her enigmatic, instinctually accurate style...

In this moving interview, Sandra Cisneros reveals the connection between history and family history: the processes of memory....

Joyce Carol Oates' I'll Take You There (Ecco) appears to be a novel about college in the 1960s and interracial dating. At its heart, though, it pits skeptical against mystical philosophy...