Bookworm

In Joy Williams ' The Quick and the Dead , bleak and wicked comedy hides the book's religious mission, demonstrating how God and Devil can be mistaken for one another...

Bee Season (Doubleday) This is Myla Goldberg 's haunting first novel, about a Jewish family torn apart by manias born of spiritual mysticism on the one hand, and fear and silence on the other....

The Bridegroom (Pantheon) Ha Jin , a Chinese writer who came to America in 1985, has published seven books of fiction and poetry in English. What are the consequences of giving up a native language? Can writing transform the anger generated by the Cultural Revolution into art?

This remarkable first novel offers an occasion to pay tribute to its late editor, and to salute its young author, whose imagery and vision promise an unusual career.

Jim the Boy (Little Brown) Tony Earley has been hailed as a new American master, and, indeed, he has written a classic rite-of-passage novel...

Kazuo Ishiguro pits a child's naïve dream of becoming a master detective against the larger mysteries of adultery, death and war....

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Random House) Michael Chabon 's novel about escape artists, super heroes and the Golden Age of Comics is a complete entertainment...

The work of novelists Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes is characterized by complexity, beauty and sophistication. Guess what? They write comics!

Amy Gerstler regards her poetry as a sort of spell to ward off danger. Her new book deals with the tragedies that cannot be evaded by magic.

The house of fiction has many rooms. Russell Banks talks about the life- choices that led him to occupy his particularly gritty sublet.

While revealing her passion for storytelling, cunning Margaret Atwood carefully avoids the secret mechanisms of her engrossing new novel, "The Blind Assassin."

Chicken, Shadow, Moon and More (Turtle Point) We defy you not to laugh when you hear these poems from the previously sepulchral laureate Mark Strand...

Little Lit: Folklore and Fairy Tale Funnies (Harper Collins) In this second interview about Little Lit , its creators, Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly , remind us that comic books are not just for adults. They talk about the new maturity that leads underground artists to take the safety pins out of their noses and use them in their babies' diapers.

T he reticent Michael Ondaatje becomes more revealing. Here he goes so far as to formulate his artistic credo and even makes comments that truly define his unusual vision.

Le Marriage (Dutton) The bird-like flutings of Diane Johnson 's amused voice animate this merry duet about France, comedy, depravity and marriage.

Sherman Alexie The Toughest Indian in the World (Grove Atlantic) Sherman Alexie is the cynical, irreverent Indian writer (he does not use the term Native American) whose rough, funny stories have led to more than one brush with the tribal elders. Hear him laugh at the kind of people who romanticize &quotthe; rez."

Zadie Smith White Teeth (Random House) Young Zadie Smith's dizzying comic take on multi-racial London. Her background, she says, was so mixed that P.G. Wodehouse's pure-bloods seemed to her to be foreign and &quotexotic.;"

NOTE: Poet Mark Strand has died at the age of 80. He was a Pulitzer prize-winning poet and Poet Laureate of the United States. He appeared on Bookworm in 2000. A brow-furrowing conversation with a former poet laureate Mark Strand...

Horse Heaven (Knopf) At a gallop, Jane Smiley tells us everything she knows about horse breeding, horse racing, horse trading...

Blue Angel pivots on a question of academic sexual harassment...

J.R. Salamanca That Summer's Trance (Welcome Rain Press) Salamanca's first book in fourteen years, That Summer's Trance, a shimmering book about love, desire and betrayal, bears the erotic imprint and the tragic sense of life that readers first encountered in his classic novel Lilith

Little Lit: Folklore and Fairy Tale Funnies (Harper Collins) Author Art Spiegelman and editor Francoise Mouly introduce Little Lit , their new collection of comics by world-renowned children's book artists and underground cartoonists-all based on fairy tales, all for kids, all in color and beautiful beyond belief.

Our Heartbreaking Group of Staggering Geniuses comes to its conclusion with "Grandmaster" Wallace : a conversation about difficulty , gender, transgression and the use of received ideas-all earmarks of staggering genius.

In George Saunder's dystopian theme parks, the American Dream festers and thrives fertilized by self-help movements and Big Brother type cults.

Bret Easton Ellis Glamorama (Knopf) Ellis, a godfather to the new fiction scene, describes what it-s like to have one foot in each of two generations. He comes from the minimalists (the Raymond Carver gang), but his recent book, Glamorama, is a step in the new direction--complex, ironic, deconstructive, maximalist.