Bookworm

In a culture whose major activities include consumption and the production of waste, John D'Agata ponders the adjacency of Las Vegas and a proposed nuclear waste dumping ground...

Elif Batuman never intended to study literature, learn Russian,or learn to speak Uzbek. That's no life for a grown up!. And yet she fell passionately in love with literature...

Planisphere (Ecco) John Ashbery has made a dumbfounding statement: he is afraid that sometimes "the language gets in the way of the music of a poem."  This is dumbfounding because what is there in poetry other than language?

Union Atlantic (Doubleday)While Adam Haslett's new novel tracks the underground movements of big money and global management, he still has his novelist's eye on the intimacies, even the perversities, of eccentric individuals...

The Unnamed (Little, Brown) Josh Ferris, who won a huge audience with his hilarious office novel, Then We Came to the End, has done an about-face — he's left the office....

New Directions, the press that began by publishing Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Tennessee Williams and which today gives us Roberto Bolaño, W. G. Sebald and Anne Carson, deserves celebration. Editor in Chief Barbara Epler takes us on a guided tour of American’s pre-eminent literary publisher...

Silk Parachute (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)John McPhee, our nation’s premier essayist—the man who helped raise creative non-fiction to an art form—speaks about the intricacy of his writing process...

Just Kids (Ecco) In the second of this two-part interview we hear about Patti Smith as a bookworm. You probably know about her love for Rimbaud, but did you know she worships the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov and his great novel, The Master and Margarita? A voracious reader, Smith has written three unpublished novels and has created hundreds of visual pieces. She speaks of her unbounded appetite for creativity.

Just Kids (Ecco) Poverty and insanity are terrible things—but then there is bohemian poverty and insanity, and these are infused with the romance of becoming an artist. In the first of this two-part interview, Patti Smith speaks of her youth in New York, when she and Robert Mapplethorpe sought to manifest their artistic ambitions...

Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (New Directions)Our conversation with Javier Marías continues. What if ten minutes of espionage took a hundred pages to fully describe? Here we explore time and consciousness in what will possibly be the greatest trilogy of our new century.

Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (New Directions)What if Henry James — the patron saint of convolution — could be resurrected? What if he wrote a novel of espionage so complex it became a trilogy? Spanish writer Javier Marías has stepped in and taken on the epic task...

Sonata Mulattica (Norton) Beethoven once dedicated a sonata to a half-African musician—then revoked the dedication. Why? In her book-length poem, Rita Dove attempts an imaginative historical reconstruction of what happened.

The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics (Abrams ComicArts) TOON Books and Raw Books co-editors Spiegelman and Mouly tunneled through archives and private collections to create this perfect anthology of classic children's comics, the spunky kids and sassy animals you may envision at the edges of your memory. Walk down memory's backs streets with us when we explore the golden age of someone else's childhood.

Chronic City (Doubleday) Jonathan Lethem began his career with Philip K. Dick-inspired science fiction, then he turned to writing the more realistic books that brought him to prominence. Here, we discuss the fusion of the two...

Nog (Two Dollar Radio); Flats / Quake (Two Dollar Radio) When Flats and Quake were published, the sixties were ending, and these novels can be said to chronicle the death of a dream. (Part I airs January 14)

Nog (Two Dollar Radio); Flats / Quake (Two Dollar Radio) In this first of two interviews, Wurlitzer takes us time-traveling back to the late 1960's when Nog was published and his first screen plays (Two Lane Blacktop, Glen and Randa) found their way onto the screen... (Part II airs January 21)

The Lacuna (Harper) What do Leon Trotsky, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera have to do with an invented author of Mayan and Incan historical romances?

Wallace Shawn’s newest play intermingles fact and fantasy in such a bizarre and original way that one would have to see (or even read) the play two or three times to get things (relatively) straight. Shawn discusses innovative theater in relation to his political beliefs as expressed in his new collection of essays.

The Museum of Innocence (Knopf)The Nobel Prize helped to set the fiction of Orhan Pamuk (and Turkish literature in general) in a contemporary global frame. Our conversation centers on the problem of national versus global literatures...

The Museum of Innocence (Knopf)Infidelity and adultery are two of the great subjects of the novel tradition — think of Anna Karenina or Madam Bovary. In this conversation, Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk discusses his own stunning contribution to this tradition.