Bookworm

Philosopher Mark de Silva's debut novel shows what a novel can do when it goes off the beaten track.

Darryl Pinckney talks about the attraction of leaving America to discover how to be an African-American in America.

Ryan Gattis' new book, All Involved, is really a reconstitution of the L.A. riots from a person who wasn't there.

Larissa MacFarquhar writes about do-gooders who practice effective altruism. They don't care what others think of their extreme choices. They care about being effective.

Edmund de Waal takes us on a vast journey into the history and heart, skin and bones of porcelain.

Bruce Bauman's new novel is like a family with everyone, including the reader, struggling to find a place, a home, a sense of community.

Poets and editors CAConrad, Robert Dewhurst, and Joshua Beckman talk both about groundbreaking, boldly gay poet/activist, John Wieners, and about the process of compiling and honoring such a prolific poet with the selected works book.

Hotel reviews that really, become reviews on life.

Salman Rushdie's version of The Arabian Nights, his attempt to understand what the through-line of the collection of classic tales is and partly as a portrait of the human race and its salvation. (Repeat)

Paul Murray's comic novel dramatizes an economic crisis in his native Ireland, one that imperils the vitality of Dublin's culture.

Poet, fiction writer, essayist and dramatist Eileen Myles on success, the relevancy of poetry and surviving as a poet

Allende brings her emotional wisdom to the love lives of three generations of post World War II Asian and Jewish characters.

Sandra Cisneros, now in her sixties, looks back at her journey to find her voice, in a candid memoir woven from prose, photographs, and essays.

Jonathan Franzen's latest book is an exploration of intensely intimate relationships and the inevitability of their destructive effects. 

The outlandish and unguarded Gary Indiana has written what can be described as an "anti-memoir." He doesn't like memoirs but has written one himself, partly because he has lived a real life all over the world: he actually has something to write about. 

Is it common practice to lie in a memoir? Not for accomplished memoirists, according to Mary Karr. The Art of Memoir, in part a how-to book, distills 30 years of teaching and writing memoir.

The writer's writer, Joy Williams, has written a book that spans her body of work – from familiar stories to new ones, showcases her deep, natural understanding of the process of writing. 

Patrick deWitt's latest book follows his penchant for building humiliation into his novels. 

Bill Clegg makes the transition from memoirist to novelist. His book and its title are a statement on the kindness of strangers and the necessity to fashion one's own family.

In The State We're In: Maine Stories, Ann Beattie deftly and effortlessly takes the ingredients that make up short stories and shakes them up to create something new and beautiful.