Bookworm

Daniel Mendelsohn’s  Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones  is an uncommon collection of essays that intertwine the personal with the intellectual and critical.

Jonathan Blum wrote characters with open destinies, in stories with open endings, for his new book of short stories,  The Usual Uncertainties .

Ben Lerner’s  Leaving the Atocha Station  and  10:04  find their synthesis in  The Topeka School , the third in his Hegelian trilogy.

In André Aciman’s Find Me , strokes of luck are destiny.

Again Deborah Eisenberg demonstrates herself as a masterful and electric writer, in her new collection of seven stories,  Your Duck Is My Duck .

Adina Hoffman’s " Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures"  is about a man of multitudes.

Chris Ware’s   Rusty Brown  depicts life the way it is: jam packed with details, the closer you look the ever more there is.

And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks  by Lawrence Weschler is a book that can only be itself.

From the archives, Ocean Vuong speaks of leaving his thumbprint on his new novel  On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous . Alternate modes of storytelling are discussed, as are narratives without intrinsic conflict.  On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous  is a letter from a son to a mother who doesn’t read English; it is about finding joy in innovative and creative survival.

Lynda Barry’s  Making Comics  is a how-to graphic novel guide for people who gave up on drawing.

Jeanette Winterson’s  Frankissstein: A Love Story   is about time travel and body travel.

Lynda Barry and Chris Ware discuss the culture of comics, and their new books,  Making Comics  and  Rusty Brown . 

John Freeman and Robin Coste Lewis discuss  Freeman’s: The Best New Writing on California .

In tribute, from the archives, a conversation with Harold Bloom (1930-2019) in his apartment to talk about his book, The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible. A discussion officially about the great King James translation of the Old and New Testaments. But when you talk with Harold Bloom, you talk about everything—politics, poetry, teaching, aging, reading and ul...

Benjamin Moser’s  Sontag: Her Life and Wor k is interested in the writing and ideas of Susan Sontag.

Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte is explored as a modern take on the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, with the opera Don Quichotte by Jules Massenet a strong influence.

Salman Rushdie’s  Quichotte  depicts the pleasures of fiction.

The structure of Emma Donoghue’s  Akin  leads the reader through one surprise after another.

Language-loving twin sisters discover themselves united by passion but separated by needs in The Grammarians, the eleventh book by Cathleen Schine.

Dunce , by Mary Ruefle, finds meaning everywhere.

Katya Apekina’s novel The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish has a dark sense of humor, and an interest in the soul.

Sarah Rose Etter’s  The Book of X   belongs to a literary conversation about the grotesque and surreal.

Characters with DNA, blood and soul populate forty three stories and a novella by Peter Orner:  Maggie Brown & Others .

From the archives, a highly resonate conversation with Toni Morrison about transfiguring love, as portrayed in her novel  Beloved .

Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison passed away this week at 88 years of age.  Bookworm is rebroadcasting a 2009 conversation with her about her novel, A Mercy.*