Bookworm

A tale of the ordinary, everyday quest for contentedness -- written entirely in heroic couplets.

Vivian Gornick's memoir The Odd Woman and the City takes us on a tour of a life that is lived by walking, observing and talking. Gornick keeps her eyes open, and does she ever have a mouth on her!

Paradoxically, Geoff Dyer begins his attempt to locate America by first traveling to Tahiti. There, he discovers that Gauguin’s vision of it no longer exists – if it ever really did. Can he find the soul of America in its landscapes?

In part two of this conversation about LaRose – Louise Erdrich's novel about an act of restorative justice that tests the boundaries between two families – the discussion explores the non-linear form the novel moves in towards seeking balance and resolution.

In Louise Erdrich's LaRose, a terrible tragedy forces two families to resort to a form of traditional "restorative justice" in which one son must be given to replace the loss of another. Erdrich talks about this act as an attempt at restoring balance in a tight knit community where healing can take generations.

Joyce Carol Oates raises questions about memory – ethics, what it means to love, identity, and the ability to engage, and takes us on a trip down memory lane with a reading from a previous memoir recounting her favorite bad-for-you childhood foods. 

A. Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius is the biography of Maxwell Perkins, a long time Scribner editor who worked with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. 

John Keene takes classic American narratives and stands them on their heads. In North and South American tales, he writes about the "others" (Indians, blacks, queers) to re-examine stories we think we know. 

Despite 20 years of study, John D'Agata believes that we're still in the "Wild West" of coming to terms with the essay, its long heritage and its creation.

Originally commissioned to write a novel for Jumex, a Mexican beverage company and supporter of the arts, Luiselli instead chose to write a novel for Jumex's factory workers. 

Greenwell's first novel examines the relationship between an American teacher in Bulgaria with a male prostitute.

After four acclaimed short story collections, Means' first novel takes on the Vietnam War.

Helen Macdonald's new book is her account of working through her grief over her father's death by adopting and training a goshawk.

The characters of Christopher Sorrentino's novel are unreliable narrators. They're liars who hide the truth, not only from themselves but ultimately from the reader. 

Greg Jackson's new collection of eight stories follows the lives of youngish people of privilege on their journey to deconstruct just what their destination is supposed to be. But his characters might be running up against the mystery of themselves.

Blanchfield's essays reveal truths about a queer poet in the post-AIDS era.

Dana Spiotta's Innocents and Others tells the feminist story of how women make do in a male-dominated world through two female filmmaker best friends, and a third, troubled woman adept at beguiling powerful Hollywood men. 

David Remnick and Deborah Treisman, editor and fiction editor, take us through the fiction at the New Yorker and how it has changed over the years. 

Joshua Cohen's The Book of Numbers  follows the rise of the Internet through a protagonist he modeled after some of the web's biggest shapers, including Google's Sergey Brin, but mostly Apple's Steve Jobs.

Elizabeth McKenzie's half screwball romantic comedy and half critique of the conspicuous consumption of the leisure class, featuring a heroine named after the depressive American economist Thorstein Veblen and a cast that includes advice-giving squirrels.