Bookworm

Lorrie Moore &quotBirds; of America" (Knopf) Lorrie Moore shows how her short stories compare with the ballads of Tin Pan Alley. That is: how do you give misery and lovesickness the bounce of a popular tune?

Part II of a two-part interview. An epic love story? From Salman Rushdie ?! How and why Rushdie, the great cynic, surmounts the worn conventions of boy-meets-girl.

Gods and goddesses-from those of Greece and India, to the media pantheon of Rock and Roll-underlie The Ground Beneath Her Feet . Salman Rushdie on the uses of myth. (Part I of a two-part interview. )

Nathan Englander &quotFor; the Relief of Unbearable Urges" (Knopf)Jewish-American fiction takes a riveting new direction in the work ofNathan Englander, who was brought up Hasidic on Long Island. Thetwenty-nine year old writer breaks your heart when he reads from his story&quotThe; Tumblers."

Steven Watson &quotPrepare; for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism" (Random House) &quotFour; Saints inThree Acts" by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson was a modernistsneak-attack, the result of cunning and deliberation. Here's how they did it.

Sue Miller &quotWhile; I Was Gone" (Knopf) Sue Miller's new novel has an odd morality ? could it be that generations of preachers have influencedher thought?

Alex Garland &quotThe; Tesseract" (Riverhead) In this unusual interview, the popular young English novelist (The Beach) presents the secret purpose of his work: a closely reasoned defense of atheism.

Heads by Harry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Asian-American Lois-Ann Yamanaka evokes the melding of native traditions with tourist pop culture that characterized her Hawaiian childhood.

Amsterdam (Doubleday) Articulate and sinister Booker Prize-winner Ian McEwan discusses the role of pathology (and that poet of pathology, Sigmund Freud) in his work.

Thom Jones &quotSonny; Liston Was a Friend of Mine" (Little Brown) Thom Jones, famous for his short stories, brings his trademark dementia and wooziness to a discussion of his own writing.

Social historian Mary F. Corey joins David Remnic, the new editor of the New Yorker, for a look at the world as it was projected by this influential magazine in the 1950's. Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Mid-Century (Harvard). A social historian joins the new editor of the New Yorker for a look at the world as it was projected by this influential magazine in the 1950's.

Memories of My Father Watching TV (Dalkey Archive) This novel describes a man who remembers his father mostly through the TV shows they watched together...

Marina Warner &quotNo; Go the Bogeyman" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) The dark side of fairy tales. A conversation about the cultural persistence of the threateners of children, ogres, cannibals, vampires and kidnapers-with a special guest appearance by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Harry Mathews &quotOulipo; Compendium" (Atlas) Poet-novelist Harry Mathews discusses a unique literary movement and shows how strong emotion can penetrate even the most whimsical and arbitrary forms.

Bret Easton Ellis &quotGlamorama;" (Knopf) He has been rejected by critics and reviled by Gen X, yet Bret Easton Ellis reaches to the core of an eerie American phenomenon: the postmodern fusion of terror and irony.

Mitch Sisskind &quotDivine; Deception: The Inner Gender of Gender" (Earl University Press) A maverick scholar unravels the secret hoaxes that have masked the sexuality of many authors of Western Literature-from the Bible to the internet.

Nuruddin Farah &quotSecrets;" (Arcade) An extraordinary conversation about the Somali author's language and family. The sounds of a mother's speech patterns initiate a web of recollection-magic realism from a deep, personal wellspring.

Kevin Killian &quotPoet; Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance" (Wesleyan/New England) Jack Spicer was the maddest, loneliest and most inspired poet on the Berkeley arts scene. His biographer makes sense of Spicer's techniques for rearranging the senses.

Irvine Welsh &quotFilth;" (Norton) From anarchism (Trainspotting) to fascism (Filth): Irvine Welsh on his gallery of outsiders.

T.C. Boyle Stories (Viking) T.C. Boyle describes the styles and attitudes that have earned him a trademark in the writing of short stories.

A. L. Kennedy &quotOriginal; Sin" (Knopf) The first American publication ofthis lively and quirky member of the new Scottish renaissance. Talk aboutthe war between the sexes! Better yet, talk about a powerful new voice.

Re-imagining Shakespeare's life as a high-flying farce in Shakespeare in Love. We talk about gender, comedic structure and challenge of putting Shakespeare on the screen.

The new editor of the New Yorker on the techniques of the profile. How does one journalist master sports writing for his book on Ali, having won a Pulitzer for his anatomy of the new Russia?

A Man in Full (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) As a New Journalist, Tom Wolfe infiltrated sub-cultures: the Merry Pranksters,U.S. Astronauts, New York painters. In his novels, he aims for the bigpicture -- the whole cultural machine...

Cathleen Schine &quotThe; Evolution of Jane" (Holt) A comedy of manners turns into a nightmare of subjectivity. Cathleen Schine on moving from third-to-first person narration-that is, from manners to madness.