Bookworm

Literary legends Captain Ahab and Captain Nemo are pitted against each other by real life engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel in Howard Rodman’s  The Great Eastern .

The poetry in Ariana Reines's  A Sand Book  is centered around the theme of hiding: running away and trying to escape.

Ocean Vuong speaks of leaving his thumbprint within his new novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous .

Editor/poet David Trinidad, poet Amy Gerstler, and publisher Ruth Greenstein reflect on the dynamic mind behind  Punk Rock is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith .

David Trinidad’s  Swinging on a Star  is a two-part collection of poems that put the human in pop culture.

 Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans is a polyphonic novel about social class and identity, with a revelation in every chapter.

A stunning graphic novel by one of the medium’s greatest creators, Seth’s Clyde Fans is about people living in a memory fog, and the strange reverie that life takes on when one grows older.

Ben’s life falls down around him, and he’s the protagonist, in  A Wonderful Stroke of Luck , by master writer Ann Beattie.

The Parade ,  by Dave Eggers, is a book of creeping dread, where every worst thing is possible, and rational reason leads one to expect that the worst is not over.

About the interdependence between humans and trees, Richard Powers found a place for the non-human in literary fiction with his new book,   The Overstory .

Seventy sonnets written in the first two hundred days of Trump's presidency,  American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin , by Terrance Hayes, flies out of the cages of literary, cultural, and historical forms. Warning :  Today's episode contains strong language that some listeners may find offensive. 

The stories in Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, try to capture what’s human in what otherwise may only be trends.

Her fourth book, which took her six years to write, An American Marriage brought Tayari Jones to the attention of Oprah’s Book Club. 

John Lanchester’s The Wall is a wild love story with a dystopian backdrop.

In Nathan Englander’s  kaddish.com , a secular Jewish son experiments with the task of shepherding his father’s soul safely to rest.

Chris Cander’s  The Weight of a Piano   explores characters with passionate attachments to things that have been lost. 

Valeria Luiselli's  Lost Children Archive  tells the story of a family by combining the American road trip subgenre with the Latin American tradition of an inward journey. 

Her nature oppositional, Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway is a sad, funny, hilarious, and melancholic novel.

In Yiyun Li’s  Where Reasons End , a mother discovers a place where she can talk to her son who committed suicide.

Marlon James discusses the endlessly beautiful and brutal world of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first novel in The Dark Star Trilogy. 

Sea Monsters  is a fascinatingly consistent and exquisitely shaped novel by Chloe Aridjis.

Bookworm alumnus Dennis Cooper, and collaborator Zac Farley, discuss the creative impulses behind their film  Permanent Green Light .

A novel that presents ambiguity as a constant feature of modern life,   Hark   is a book full of tensions, written with Sam Lipsyte’s fine grain strangeness, and absent of easy answers.

A writer of ten novels in French,  Holy Lands  is the first novel by Amanda Sthers to appear in English, translated by herself.

Tosh Berman’s memoir,  Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World , is a depiction of culture brought into Los Angeles from the rest of the world: reinvented to be here.