Bookworm

Blake's Therapy (7 Stories Press) Ariel Dorfman describes his goal: to subvert the techniques of melodrama and thriller-writing in order to penetrate illusion and arrive at reality with a capital R.

The Tether (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Pastoral (Gray Wolf) Strongly influenced by the Metaphysical poets, Carl Phillips writes a mixture of erotic and devotional poetry...

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (Harper Collins) Louise Erdrich mixes elements of her German and Native American ancestry to create a collage of history, mythology and good old-fashioned storytelling....

Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Norton) John Felstiner has produced a superb translation of works by the great Holocaust poet Paul Celan...

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House) Nicholson Baker has been on a crusade to preserve intact our books and newspapers. In Double Fold, he exposes the efforts of some of the greatest enemies of paper.

Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong (Copper Canyon Press) Ho Xuan Huong was an 18th century Vietnamese poet and concubine. Poet John Balaban served as a conscientious objector in Vietnam during the war. We explore the complex destinies that led him to learn Vietnamese and to translate Ho's complex, erotic poems.

The Best of Jackson Payne (Knopf) A conversation with author Jack Fuller , who happens to be the president of the Tribune Publishing Company, and Steve Wasserman , editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, about concern journalistic ethics, conflicts of interest, and art.

The Glass Palace (Random House) Amitav Ghosh 's ambitions are Tolstoyan. He chronicles the tragedies of the British Empire in India and Burma. His mission: to reconcile large historical themes with his novelistic interest in the intimate details of personal destiny.

Woodcuts of Women (Grove) Dagoberto Gilb 's stories have enormous poetic vitality, yet he feels that he suffers from a lack of recognition. Has his status as a Latino inhibited his acceptance by the literary establishment?

Father of the Four Passages (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) In this novel, the distance between autobiography and fiction is minimal. Lois-Ann Yamanaka is living with the problems of raising an autistic child; she has written about the struggle. Does writing help?

The Bonesetter's Daughter (Putnam) During the writing of The Bonesetter's Daughter , Amy Tan endured both the death of her mother and the death of her editor...

Sweet Hearts (Houghton Mifflin)Melanie Rae Thon's new novel is very strange: it's narrated by a woman who cannot hear and has not witnessed the events she describes. Her condition inspires our conversation about suffering, grace and the presence of God.

The Death of Vishnu (Norton) In his first novel, Manil Suri reenacts the Bhagavad-Gita in modern Bombay....

Guess Again (Simon & Schuster) Bernard Cooper explores the temptations he faces in his writing: a yearning for permanence and security rivaled by a sneaking affection for odd, transient and unique experiences...

Expressing outright admiration for this new collection of stories, Bookworm attempts to pin down Ann Beattie 's elusive techniques...

Matthew Klam discusses the sexcapades of the stud muffins and alleycats of his post-moral stories, truly the most audacious chronicle of sexual discomfort since the stories of John O'Hara...

Jerome Rothenberg, editor A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections About the Book and Writing (Granary) Who knows what books will look like ten years from now! While e-books and new technologies loom, poet, anthologist and ethnopoeticist Jerome Rothenberg offers alternative ways to think about books: as sacred objects, storage machines, objects d'art.

Richard Powers' intensity and sincerity blaze through as he discusses science, personal sacrifice and the common mis-assumption that cerebral writers are without passion.

Ursula LeGuin The Telling (Harcourt Brace) Ursula Le Guin believes that science fiction writers create new worlds in order to understand this one. We discuss the death of literacy and the use of religious fanaticism to limit civil rights in her world of the future. Read about this Book

Off Keck Road (Knopf) Mona Simpson 's delicately textured and beautifully detailed novella about small-town life in Wisconsin provides the occasion for this conversation about women, romance and the decision not to marry.

Bodies in Motion and at Rest (Norton) As a result of his two professions (poet and funeral director), Thomas Lynch has an unusual attitude toward tradition, decorum and memory...

Eduardo Galeano's denunciation of our multinational globalized future is characteristically brilliant, whimsical-devastating. 

The comic book, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon), is Bookworm's nominee for the past year's most interesting novel!

The Golden Age (Doubleday) With the completion of his American Empire series, author Gore Vidal reflects upon our national destiny...

The Royal Family (Viking) William Vollmann 's growing sense of mystical Christianity is bringing him closer to Dostoevsky...