Bookworm

Damascus Gate (Houghton Mifflin). Robert Stone explores the underlying holiness of all faith--from the fanatic's to the mystic's, from the con-man's to the addict's...

Dorothy Allison, author of Cavedweller (Dutton). Dorothy Allison's arrival as a significant voice in mainstream American fiction provokes questions of identity and the limits of truthfulness. How far can she go?

Timothy O'Grady author of I Could Read the Sky (Harvill). A collaborative novel consisting of prose by Tim O'Grady and photographs by Steve Pike, I Could Read the Sky is a devastating account of the lives of Irish workers in England. O'Grady explores his own uprooted nature and how he discovered his &quotvoice.;"

A Tribute to Julio Cort---r. Stephen Kessler, the translator of Save Twilight (City Lights), the first volume of Cort---r's poetry to appear in English, discusses the great South American fabulist--his life, his lunacy, his politics, his surrealism, and his cat.

The fictionalized life of abolitionist Frederick Douglass is the jumping-off point for a conversation about the white writer's contribution to a  discussion of race....

The Smithsonian Institution (Random House) The urbane Gore Vidal on the emotional center of his newest "invention"...

Aharon Appelfeld, author of The Iron Tracks (Schocken). The Israeli writer reveals the story behind the writing of his newest novel, a fable about the life of a concentration camp survivor who obsessively revisits the scenes of his imprisonment.

Alice McDermott's prose captures the suburban Irish-American family. How does her dense, constricted, complex writing-style reflect the lives of these everyday folk?

Jim Crase, author of Quarantine (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This novel of faith by an atheist follows Jesus through his forty-day fast in the desert. It is a rare accomplishment--a realistic novel about a miracle worker, a farce about devotion.

Night Train (Crown) Suicide is the solution to the mystery in Martin Amis ' noir thriller with existentialist undercurrents.

The Given and the Made, The Breaking of Style, Soul Says (Harvard) How does a poet change styles? What turns an autobiographical incident into a poem? Helen Vendler on some of the basic issues of modern poetry.

Maureen Howard, author of A Lover's Almanac (Viking). The latest from Maureen Howard's over-loaded &quotdata; base" is a new novel about love--and biology, art, destiny, astrology, process, history.

David Malouf, author of Conversations at Curlow Creek (Vintage). The award-winning Australian writer searches for a lost child--a search that has mysteriously occupied Malouf for his entire writing life.

Amos Oz, author of Panther in the Basement (Harcourt Brace), reminisces about Israel on the eve of its independence: a portrait of the author as book-loving adolescent.

Robert Olen Butler The Deep Green Sea (Holt) In this obsessional erotic fantasy about cross-cultural incest, Butler displays the full range of his fictional themes--but does his mythomania bear any relation to truth?

Jonathan Coe, a young English writer, has the temperament of a dark, experimental, comic novelist, but he chooses to stay within certain acceptable conventions. A conversation about safety and risk.

Arthur Golden Memoirs of a Geisha (Knopf) A Harvard-educated man writes the fictional life of a famous courtesan. A Westerner reveals the secrets of Asia. How does a writer assume the authority to transcend gender and culture?

George Plimpton Truman Capote (Doubleday) Plimpton, the founding father of the modern literary interview and for years the editor of The Paris Review, talks about the nature of the literary interview and the art of biography.

Miroslav Holub Shedding Life (Milkweed) The renowned Czech poet and immunologist explores the border between art and science, questions the beloved tenets of humanists--and reveals his own latent tenderness.

Tess Gallagher At the Owl Woman Saloon (Scribner) Tess Gallagher reveals her &quotwitching;" techniques that transform talk into literary language. She also speaks candidly about her relationship with Raymond Carver and explains how each influenced the other's work.

David Grossman The Zig Zag Kid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) The Israeli writer tells the story of how a book written for his son's coming-of-age became a cross-over hit--an adult best-seller in Israel.

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Random House) Why do adults need fairy tales? What is, at its essence, the heart of a story? The answers appear as international wise-woman A. S. Byatt unravels the "fairy stories for adults" in her most-recent book.

An unusually revealing conversation about female masochism and creativity: Oates on the harrowing of the flesh, penitence and salvation.

Open Me...I'm a Dog (Harper Collins) In this discussion of a "mind trip" for children, Art Spiegelman reads from his new children's book--with running commentary from the Bookworm.

The infrequently interviewed Don DeLillo discusses his epic novel, Underworld , particularly the movement toward sincerity and simplicity that characterizes the book's climactic chapters.