Bookworm

Night Soul and Other Stories (Dalkey Archive Press)Joseph McElroy is well regarded as one of the most demanding living American writers. His work is usually innovative and difficult. But in this collection of short stories, his first, stories of tenderness, often about care for children, predominate.

How can writing provide consolation? Writer Isabel Allende talks about her daughter's death and the events and feelings that led to the publication of this memoir.

The novels of T.C. Boyle are well known for addressing complex concerns about the environment and endangered species. In this brief interview, we prepare for the February publication of Boyle's most exciting environmental novel, When the Killing's Done.

The Lover's Dictionary (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) David Levithan has written a dictionary for lovers. The entries in it could apply to any romantic relationship, and yet, as you will hear in this conversation, the specificity of the entries gives the characters unanticipated depth.

Caribu Island (Harper Collins) David Vann builds his first novel out of dire materials: his father took his own life, and his stepmother's parents died in a murder/suicide...

Luka and the Fire of Life (Random House) Once again, Salman Rushdie writes a fable, this time for his second son, who has had the time to take in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and feel envy for his brother to whom that book was dedicated...

Selected Poems (Wave Books)When you hear Mary Ruefle reading her poems, you will quickly become entranced by their accessibility: they are funny and heartbreaking—simultaneously...

Lord of Misrule (McPherson) Jaimy Gordon is a recently-discovered American novelist with an original voice and vision. Her National Book Award-winning novel, Lord of Misrule, is set at Indian Mound Downs, a rinky-dink racetrack in Wheeling, West Virginia, a place where "scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain" dream of better luck someday....

Great House (Norton) Nicole Krauss is more sensitive to emotional textures and to characters than she is to conventional plot. Here, she speaks about how the careful maneuverings of feelings and the details that provoke feeling help to generate a structure for her new novel.

The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir ( Viking) The Sonoran desert, its creatures and features, its ants and plants, becomes the classroom for that most trans-human of lessons. Poet, novelist and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko provides a memoir of her education outdoors.

Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish (Archipelago); Intimate Stranger (Archipelago); Notes from the Middle World (Haymarket Books) As a writer, South African-born Breyten Breytenbach is an activist. As an activist he functions as something like a conscience. As a participant in the global response to apartheid, he was imprisoned for seven years, and his writing comes from the anguished nightmares of his imprisonment. His is the art of passionate dissent; his prose and poetry are in service of a more "human" human race.

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (Norton) This short novel emerged virtually whole — unique in the writing life of its author, Lan Samantha Chang. Perhaps this is because the book is about the writing life...

Take One Candle Light a Room (Pantheon) The complexities of race and community are at the center of Susan Straight's lively discussion about family, memory, migration and history...

My Hollywood (Knopf) Mona Simpson's new novel corkscrews its way into the heart of a Santa Monica marriage, a marriage in which child raising duties are agreed to be divided fifty-fifty between husband and wife. Instead, they are divided fifty-fifty between wife and nanny...

Bitter in the Mouth (Random House) Monique Truong is an intransigent—she will not settle for anyone's desire to interpret or in any way falsity the world she knows. This time Vietnamese-born Truong sets to revealing the lies implicit in the question, "What is it like to grow up Asian in America?"

Tom McCarthy's C (Knopf) is one of those post-modern novels designed to drill a hole in your head and help you inventory the contents of your mind...

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon) Charles Yu's sweeter-spirited vision of how vintage science fiction can be used to imagine our world. Caught in a computer game, the hero seeks to escape his chronic melancholy. It just so happens that our hero's name is the same as the author's...

The Four Fingers of Death (Little, Brown) Rick Moody creates a sleazoid end-of-the-world saga, basing his story on a cheapo so-bad-it's-good sci-fi classic...

What Is Left the Daughter (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Howard Norman's Wyatt Hillyer has good reason to be blocked: His parents committed suicide within an hour of one another; his love has been unrequited; he assisted in an unpremeditated hate crime...

Super Sad True Love Story (Random House) Can Lenny and Eunice find love in a futuristic America in which computer screens instantly and constantly reveal economic status and sexual "hotness" quotients?