Bookworm

The Children's Book  (Knopf)As the vast array of subjects presented in A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book parades past — puppetry, women's rights, Fabianism, Peter Pan, education, children's fiction, the history of pottery glazes — one can't help but wonder: how does it all hold together?

Though he’s had five books published, Tao Lin is not yet thirty. Yet, for all his industriousness, he expresses the apathy and emptiness felt by many of his generation.

Practical Water ( Wesleyan) Brenda Hillman's work has been described as difficult and experimental, but we beg to disagree. Here, we hear some of her most accessible poems; discuss her work with Code Pink, a feminist activist group; and try to describe the way to read a so-called "difficult" poem. The live broadcast of this interview will be pre-empted by special holiday programming, but will be available in the KCRW archives.

Margaret Atwood thinks she has done something new: her novel takes place simultaneously with Oryx and Crake — her nightmare novel about the biotechnological future...

As Is  (Copper Canyon)One of our most tender poets (tough but tender), James Galvin, investigates his growing tendency toward poems that express his bitterness— toward politics, environmental despoilment, big business. Still he affirms, in poems that breathe with sweet relief, the ongoing possibility of love.

The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster)The polymath Nicholson Baker has been able to create a version of himself in the figure of accomplished poet Paul Chowder...

Glover's Mistake (Viking) In this novel of love, manipulation and deception, Nick Laird attempts one of the trickiest strategies in the novelist's tool kit. He structures a book so that readers come to understand things the characters remain blind to.

A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf) Lorrie Moore has written three collections of short stories and two rather short novels. Now, after eleven years of work, she has published a longer novel and survived to tell the tale...

The Angel's Game (Doubleday)Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón has attracted an international audience with his series of metaphysical thrillers.

Ugly Man (Harper Collins) Although we've followed the career of Dennis Copper from the ground up, in this conversation, he acknowledges a new influence—the master director of French film comedy, Jacques Tati.

Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Dalkey Archive)  This new anthology makes clear that magical realism is only a tiny segment of what’s been happening in Mexican fiction over the last half-century. In this conversation with its editor, Álvaro Uribe, and Cristina Rivera-Garza, one of the writers whose work appears in the book, we uncover a cavalcade of styles and influences, as well as a host of writers whose names will be new to American readers.  

Road Show, a recording of the musical (Nonesuch, PS Classics) Stephen Sondheim is right — his new musical, Roadshow, is not gloomy. Sondheim and his collaborator, playwright John Weidman, discuss the many revisions of the musical that has evolved in an extraordinary way, and may yet become an American classic...

How to Sell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Clancy Martin's first novel reads like a piece of sleaze, but it turns out — surprise! — to be a philosophical novel about the problems of appearance and reality...

Let the Great World Spin (Random House) Darkened by intimations of 9/11, Column McCann's generous extravaganza of a novel brings together the lives of strangers who witness a high-wire artist dancing between the two World Trade Center towers...

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Penguin Press) Reif Larsen's T. S. Spivet, twelve-year-old genius cartographer, compulsively maps everything...

Sunnyside (Knopf)What a charming raconteur Glen David Gold is, with his anecdotes about the movies, theories about identity and celebrity, and knowledge of World War I...

Eduardo Galeano has written a history of the world in brief chapters, each one devoted to an iconic incident...

Erased  (Tin House Books) In this wild and woolly conversation, Jim Krusoe reveals that his zany, unpredictable, hilarity-inspiring novels are, well, descriptions of the human condition (at least as how he sees it).

Manatee /Humanity (Penguin Poets) Anne Waldman guides us through this book-length poetry-and-prose meditation on endangered species by describing an initiation ceremony designed to instill a deeper sense of compassion....

Lowboy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) John Wray's novel about a schizophrenic boy's quest for sex and/or love flirts violently with the thriller form...