Bookworm

Junot Diaz's stories render the young-immigrant experience in harsh, unforgettable rhythms. Here he discusses the art of telling the truth.

Naked Sleeper (Harper Collins) Sigrid Nunez on gender and narrative strategy, the sub-genre known as the "woman's weepie."

Frank McCourt Angela's Ashes (Scribner) Memories have becomes trendy, but Frank McCourt's emotional masterpiece bucks the trend. A conversation about how this powerful work -- comprised of comedy and pain, told in the beautifully sustained tones of an Irish tenor -- finally came to be.

The Last Thing He Wanted (Knopf)   Part II of a special two-part interview with a novelist whose works have defined the essences of American places (Los Angeles, Miami, New York) and times (the sixties, the seventies, the eighties).  

The Last Thing He Wanted (Knopf) Part I of a special two-part interview with a novelist whose works have defined the essences of American places (Los Angeles, Miami, New York) and times (the sixties, the seventies, the eighties). Topics include the influences of T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, and her contemporary, Joyce Carol Oates, the nature of resonance and the role of accident an...

Ellen Brodkey This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death by Harold Brodkey (Metropolitan Books) Ellen Brodkey, widow and editor, joins Bookworm in a memorial to the life and death of American writer Harold Brodkey on the occasion of the publication of his AIDS journal.

Accordion Crimes (Scribner) In her newest book, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Annie Proulx presents an historical cavalcade: her vision of the violence that has been perpetuated against emergingminority cultures.

Thom Jones Cold Snap (Little Brown) More than a decade passed between the author's stint at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the publication of his first book. How does a writer endure the hard times?.

Lucille Clifton The Terrible Stories (BOA Editions) Her influences, inclinaiton toward short poems and decision to tell &quotthe; terrible stories" are discussed by the poet.

From Idea to Publication: Nature Writing Today A panel discussion with author Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (Ecco); Orion Magazine editor George Russell; and literary agent Elizabeth Grossman.

Going Back to Bisbee Richard Shelton (University of Arizona Press) The winner of the Western States Book Award for creative non-fiction discusses his memoir of the desert of the American Southwest.

Nature and Childhood Robert Michael Pyle The Thunder Tree (Houghton Mifflin) and Scott Russell Sanders Writing from the Center (Indiana University Press) The writers discuss how adult mentors affect a child's attitude toward the natural world and how writing penetrates one's inner wilderness--the wilderness of imagination.

What is Nature Literacty? Robert Hass Sun Under Wood (Ecco)David Abram The Spell of the Senuous (Pantheon)Alison Hawthorne Deming Science and Other Poems (Louisiana State University Press) Has literacy alienated us from nature? If written language is the cause of separation, can nature-writing provide a way to re-connect? The panelists strive to answer those questions, exploring early oral culture...

Barry Lopez Field Notes (Avon) Can nature-writing heal the rift between civilzation and nature? Does activism disturb the making of art? National Book Award winner Lopez discusses the cultural tradition of nature writing.

Reynolds Price Three Gospels (Scribners)On the harshness of faith and the rigors of translation: To most people, the Gospels have the mellifluous sound of the King James version. Novelist Reynolds Price translates two of the Gospels from the original Greek, and the results are startling.

A summit conference on Richard Ford's Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day, said to be full of arrogance and irony, is actually about compromise and sincerity.

Robert Bly The Sibling Society (Addison Wesley)The relationship between interpretation and story-telling stands, in this conversation,for the relationships between meaning and action, old and young, responsibility and shallowness.

Grace Paley The Collected Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) The invaluable, funny, mischief-makerGrace Paley speaks of Jews, men, politics, children and the voices that have entered her permanent, memorable stories.

Barbara Guest Selected Poems; Fair Realism (Sun & Moon) &quotWhat; is Truth?" is the central questionof Modern Poetry. Barbara Guest approaches that question delicately, wittily and unpretentiously.

Remote (Knopf)

The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (Random House)

Duff Brenna: The Holy Book of the Beard and Jennifer Egan: Emerald City and Other Stories

Moo (Ballantine)

Hans Magnus Enzenberger Civil Wars (The New Press) The eminent German poet and culture critic explores the future of literacy and literary culture. A spiky new Asian-American voice tells de-centered tales of Honolulu pop culture.

Zamora Zinmark Rolling the R's (Kaya Production) A spiky new Asian-American voice tells de-centered tales of Honolulu pop culture.