Bookworm

Isabel Allende on war, love, autobiography, patriarchy, feminism and sex.

Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Pantheon); The Said Reader (Vintage) A passionate conversation about exile, literature and critical theory. Palestinian-born Edward Said discusses his work: from his early philosophical criticism, through critique of imperialism, to his recent memoir.

The inventor of a new style of lyrical essay writing, John D'Agata talks about the classical traditions he draws upon and the special American loneliness that resonates in his unusual sentences...    

The Soul of Rumi (Harper San Francisco) Rumi's ancient mystical poetry swings between ideals of transcendence and destruction. Coleman Barks explores the extreme polarities that underlie the work...

When The Corrections appeared, it was immediately nominated as a candidate for The Great American Novel. Jonathan Franzen discusses his manner of writing, his method of construction, and the possibility that his book advocates a family values-based neo-conservatism.

Austerlitz (Random House) What Thomas Mann was to the 1940's and Albert Camus to the 1950's probably places the German writer W. G. Sebald in relation to our new century. In this conversation, Sebald describes the source of his rare prose tone and explores the invisible presence of the concentration camps in his work.

Political Fictions (Knopf) We discover that the strategy underlying Joan Didion 's essays also provides the foundation for her fiction. She rejects the human need for stories with clear resolutions and, instead, searches out the messy realities that stories conceal.

Death of a River Guide (Grove) In this novel, a drowning river-guide in Tasmania relives his life as it recedes before him. Author Richard Flanagan insists that reality in his island homeland is stranger still...

David Means, the young winner of the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award discusses his interest in redemption, an impulse that transforms his tightly calibrated realistic fiction into a moral tightrope-walk.

Little America (Knopf) Author Henry Bromell , the son of a CIA agent, discusses the traps, secrets and patricidal rivalries that can turn father-son relationships into metaphors for espionage...

Coming Soon!!!  (Houghton Mifflin) More on the spectacular fictional inventions of John Barth -including dual narrators, Muse-author collaborations, and stories so complexly interconnected that they mirror the spiraling structure of the universe. (Part II of a two-part interview)

Coming Soon!!! (Houghton Mifflin) A full-scale celebration of the career of John Barth , one of America's greatest comic writers. His experiments with form, his crazy circumlocutions and contractions of language and, in particular, his creation of double-gendered narration are explored, explained, exhibited and exclaimed over.(Part I of a two-part interview)

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Houghton Mifflin) With the film of Lord of the Rings hard upon us, Professor Shippey recalls Tolkien and his interest in language and epic poetry. As a special treat, Shippey sings Tolkien's school song, which, disguised, makes its way into the Sagas of Middle Earth.

In part two of this interview with Salman Rushdie , we consider the wilder aspects of Fury : the influence of science fiction, surrealism and film. Special attention is paid to the blurring distinction between humans and machines and the painful irony implicit in the difficulty of making such a distinction. (Part one aired October 4.) 

In the first of a two-part interview, Salman Rushdie explores the politics, psychology and sociology of his first America-set novel, Fury .

Book of My Nights (BOA Editions) Li-Young Lee 's poetry has moved beyond the details of his Chinese upbringing to an investigation of what he calls "primal silence..."  

Dan Chaon , Among the Missing (Ballantine); Adrienne Sharp , White Swan, Black Swan (Random House) Marisa Silver , Babe in Paradise (Norton) Three young writers, each publishing a first book with a major press, explore the terrain of contemporary short-story writing, from personal backgrounds to their desires to break with tradition...

Fearless Jones (Little Brown) Walter Mosley is best known for his noir mysteries. With books set in the black communities of Los Angeles, he writes the hidden histories of race, sensuality, crime and cultural aspiration....

Silent Extras (St. Martin's) The young Dutch writer who created a sensation in Europe with his first novel, a sort of Amsterdam-set Catcher in the Rye, talks about the perils of recognition and his continuing need to evade seriousness. Read an excerpt from this book.

Bel Canto (Harper Collins) Ann Patchett knows that a novel is an author's private kingdom-problems the world can't solve can be solved within the pages of a book...

Carry Me Across the Water (Random House) Ethan Canin offers his ideas about fatherhood, memory and the betrayal children inevitably feel at the hands of their parents...

How to Be Good (Riverhead) Nick Hornby , author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, has made a shift: the gifted comic novelist has adopted a woman's voice to examine marriage, fidelity, happiness and, finally, moral goodness.

Life after Death (Random House) Carol Muske-Dukes began to write a dark comedy about death. Slowly, she discovered that compassion was reshaping her book, giving it depth and complexity...

Three Apples Fell from Heaven (Riverhead) Micheline Aharonian Marcom's stunning first novel imagines the Armenian genocide...

If in Time, Collected Poems 1975-2000 (Penguin) Ann Lauterbach believes that one of the primary functions of poetry is the demystification of the world's cliches and the creation of new wonders...