Bookworm

Daphne Merkin discusses what normative means, the concept of a normal looking life, and her new novel, “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love”.

From the archives: obliquely about Zadie Smith's "On Beauty", this intense, abstract conversation is about what a novel is.

History, autobiography, travelogue—a hybrid form—"Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning", by Alex Halberst.

Scott Spencer’s new novel, “ An Ocean Without a Shore,”  is about a life seeped in unfulfilled desires.

The co-producer of Bookworm, Shawn Michael Sullivan, was able to rebroadcast one of his favorite shows, between Michael Silverblatt and Horacio Castellanos Moya, regarding  Senselessness .

Fowzia Karimi speaks about the art of the novel, and designing Above Us the Milky Way .

Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Little Blue Kite is a generous and big-hearted children’s book about creating a spacious mind, with room for others.

Anthologist André Naffis-Sahely says he provided a historical perspective to The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature.

Victoria Chang discusses Love, Love , her children’s novel written in verse—poetry written for children.

Victoria Chang’s Obit is a poetry book about the impact of death on the living.

Benjamin Moser recently won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography   Sontag: Her Life and Work .  In this show from the archives, he talks about Susan Sontag‘s ideology: reading more books, going to more plays, traveling more, learning more, taking learning seriously, and taking culture seriously.

Daniel Kehlmann describes his new novel,  Tyll , as dark, frightening, and murky—in a good way.

Youthful nihilism, contradictory impulses, preferences and desires catch up with Rob Doyle in his explicitly autobiographical novel Threshold .

Ariana Reines discusses her A Sand Book poetry being centered around a theme of hiding: running away and trying to escape.

Charles North describes Everything and Other Poems as “messy poetry” without the formal demands of his earlier work.

Harry Dodge’s  My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing  shifts its scale from the cosmos to viruses.

Recollections of My Nonexistence is a personal, cultural, political, and journalistic hybrid narrative about the formative years in the life of Rebecca Solnit.

Stephen Wright’s  Processed Cheese  finds hilarity in the tragedy of contemporary life.

Jenny Offill’s  Weather  is a book about people living very much in our times.

Steven Sater’s  Alice By Heart  wants to reaffirm the power of the imagination, and inspire readers to reignite the wonder in themselves.

Charles Yu’s " Interior Chinatown" has won the 2020 National Book Award for fiction. In February 2020, Charles Yu spoke with KCRW's Michael Silverblatt in a live edition of Bookworm. 

A discovery readers have been waiting for, more Silvina Ocampo finally translated into English:  The Promise and Forgotten Journey.

One of the first books within a huge movement that restored respectability to memoirs,  This Boy’s Life  celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, and Tobias Wolff celebrates thirty years since being on Bookworm.

Love and I , poems by Fanny Howe, about love, the failure of love, and the transformation of love over the years.

Garth Greenwell discusses seeking human truths by writing into an abyss, and his new novel  Cleanness .