Bookworm

Per Petterson's I Refuse is a beautiful and lyrical symphony of sadness, grief and loss.

Kazuo Ishiguro starts the interview about his new book as a look at the concept of societal memory.

The border between poetry and fiction is dismantled when the poet/author is Luis Alberto Urrea. 

In talking about his new novel, David Vann tells us how the characters were born of staring for hours at different delicate fish until they revealed who he was supposed to write about. 

Charles Baxter takes us through the pleasure of discovering books for what might be called the "hidden bookshelf." 

Charles Baxter examines the elements of virtue and vice in his new collection of short stories.

Rachel Kushner talks about the earliest impulses that inspired her first novel Telex from Cuba. She wanted a new concept of time, she needed to find a voice to create that highly subjective and changeable thing--the past.

The discussion takes up writers who write about the racial "other." Can every writer do it successfully? Are there writers who shouldn't or can't? When is it appropriate and necessary?

In discussing Claudia Rankine's Citizen, an American Lyric, we discuss the way racism catches us all. 

Joyce Carol Oates shapes a novel from the Tawana Brawley scandal of the 1980's.

In Peter Cole's poetry, the Jewish mystical tradition gives rise to transmission of the spiritual vision.

The possibility of a romantic adventure novel written in the repressive language of a dictatorship like China's would be entirely heartbreaking if it weren’t so funny. It would be very funny if it weren’t so heartbreaking.

Can we truly understand another human being?

Letter to Jimmy is Congolese author Alain Mabanckou’s book-length letter to James Baldwin. 

Frank Bascombe, who's been making appearances since Ford's breakthrough novel, appears again in Richard Ford's latest novel.

Lydia Millet's new novel is fast-moving and funny -- except when it isn't. 

Colm Tóibín discusses his deeply personal story of a provincial Irishwoman who sets aside motherhood to grapple with grief. 

What is a Splash state? Poet Todd Colby tells us a splash state is the golden moment when his writing hits its ecstatic stride. 

Iranian author Goli Taraghi's recent collection translates many of her short stories of the past forty years into English for the first time.

Bookworm is joined by Marilynne Robinson to discuss Lila ( Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), the latest in a series of novels set in the backdrop of the dustbowl years.