Bookworm

The thing about life is that one day you’ll be dead (Knopf)David Shields wrote this book to relieve his terrible fear of death. He compares this fear with his ninety-something-year-old father's vigor and confidence. Although the book is full of facts about aging and death, it has the odd effect of making you feel thrilled to be alive.

Girl Factory (Tin House)In Jim Krusoe's strange and funny new novel, six women are being preserved in acidophilus in the basement of a frozen yogurt shop. The innocent hero's attempts to save these kidnapped beauties are disastrous.

His Illegal Self (Knopf)The excitement of Peter Carey's new novel is rendered through a specific stylistic choice: He integrates two wildly different voices into the sentences, creating a vibrant stereo-effect. The result is amazing--the novel's action seems to be taking place about six inches from your face.

Coeur de Lion (Mal-o-mar); The Cow (Fence Books) This astonishing young poet—still in her twenties—is surely destined to be one of the crucial voices of her generation.

Colm Tóibín candidly describes the inspirations for the stories in his first collection. Sometimes a landscape is enough to trigger a story, sometimes an anecdote or a bit of family lore.

The Gathering (Grove) In Anne Enright's Booker Prize-winning novel about a family wake, the narrator remembers, lies, invents and imagines with equal ardor.

The Jewish Messiah (Penguin) Unsettling, profane and goofy, Arnon Grunberg’s novel takes politically incorrect risks with contemporary Jewish culture.

Riding toward Everywhere (Ecco)William Vollmann decided to spend as much time as possible viewing the stars from the flatbed of a moving train. He’s a “fauxbo” not a hobo, and he movingly describes his need to find freedom by hopping a train–without any destination in mind.

Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir (Simon & Schuster)David Rieff accompanied his mother, Susan Sontag, through the medical ordeals that led to her death. We explore the death of this great writer, a woman who resisted consolation and maintained—to her last days—an enormous appetite for life.

People of the Book (Viking)The art of detection unravels the secrets of the Sarajevo Haggadah. What does the miraculous survival of this medieval codex tell us about the survival of both culture and history?

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (Vintage)How does the creative person function in a market culture? In the 25 years since The Gift was first published, this question has become increasingly more difficult to answer.

Sorry, Tree (Wave Books) and Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press) and Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press) Critic David Lehman has called the New York School of Poetry "the Last Avant Garde." Poet and critic Maggie Nelson suggests it might better be considered "one of the first gay avant gardes," since its original members included Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and James Schuyler. We examine the role of women in the New York School: Barbara Guest, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer and Eileen Myles. How did these women pave the way for today's women poets, who, like Maggie Nelson, are conscious of gender and its effects on poetry?

Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005 (Ecco) If it can still be said that a poet can have a humanizing influence on his culture, Robert Hass is such a poet. Here, as we discuss the poems in his National Book Award-winning collection, the beautiful, moving humanity of Hass' voice emerges, making us wish we were better people.

Lost Paradise (Grove) In this duel of interpretations, Dutch writer Nooteboom (who has been repeatedly shortlisted for the Nobel Prize) shows the whipper-snapper Michael Silverblatt that there are simpler, clearer, realer reasons for the angels in Lost Paradise than the over-interpreting Silverblatt wants to believe.

Oliver Sacks explores the brain's affinity for music by examining the extraordinary ways our brains adapt in response to musical aberrations. 

The Reserve (Harper)Russell Banks, one of the great living American novelists, uses the 1930's novel of passion and betrayal -- with its allied seductions, madness, and adultery -- to explore America's class system; the relationships between art, politics and wealth; and the despoiling of the American Landscape. (An abridged version of this interview will be heard live on KCRW due to our semi-annual subscription drive. It will be archived in its entirety online.)

Did Stephen Crane attempt to write a gay companion piece to his Maggie: A Girl of the Streets? Literary rumor says he tried. At any rate, now Edmund White has written it for him. 

This big, hilarious and joyful book has been twenty-five years in the making. Fran Lebowitz called it "The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization set to music."

ABC (Pantheon) In this novel, a series of unlinked personal, familial and global catastrophes leads unrelated victims to search for order. Mysteriously, the "order" they discover is alphabetical order. So many cultures begin their alphabets with ABC. Why? What revelation is concealed in the alphabet's code?

The family in Ann Patchett's Run unites rich with poor, black with white. The novel is a thriller—but the mystery at its heart is the mystery of spiritual grace...