Bookworm

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Harcourt) The loss of memory is Umberto Eco's subject here. After a stroke, an antiquarian bookseller remembers every book he's read--but he remembers nothing about himself....

The History of Love: A Novel (Norton) Memory is the subject of many novels, but Nicole Krauss' subject is the transmission of memory: how do you tell another person about the things that are no longer there?

Lunar Park (Knopf) Beginning as an autobiography, Lunar Park turns into a classic horror novel. The haunted house, however, is spooked by Bret Ellis- personal demons, and the past comes alive in creepy ways that go way beyond autobiography.

Maya Angelou believes that a writer who tells the truth can be read by anyone. James Baldwin, for example, can be enjoyed by black, white, Muslim or Jewish readers -- indeed by anyone who values reading the truth...  

Tom Wolfe discusses neuroscience and its view that there is no such thing as identity. Margaret Atwood talks about the coming threat to identity by cloning and genetic experimentation. Irish writer John Banville rails that identity does not exist.

Sandra Cisneros and Nina Marie Martínez The two Hispanic women explain how they've been put into the cage of multiculturalism, sometimes by the way they view themselves, but primarily by publishers and readers, to the extent of being expected to read only certain kinds of literature. When the names Thomas Pynchon and Marguerite Duras come up, the conversation takes a turn, and the satisfactions of broad, deep reading are embraced...

Susan Choi, Maxine Hong Kingston and Don Lee American-born writers of Asian descent explore the challenge of forging identity, while living "between cultures."

James McCourt, Camille Paglia, Alan Hollinghurst and Edmund White James McCourt discusses the emergence of "queer identity" and gives an overview of French literary theories and their influence on multiculturalism, while Camille Paglia explains the destructive nature of such theories. Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst, who writes about the gay experience, reveals that he reads very little popular gay literature. Edmund White explains how he has turned away from the aesthetic and has embraced social realism in his desire to document the AIDS crisis.

Cartoonist and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman explains how writers' identities are revealed in their work, that reading a book is like crawling into the writer's head. Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Rosen talk about the immigrant experience and the Jewish American novel...

Rita Dove, Edward P. Jones, Alice Walker and Jayne Cortez Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove reads her thrilling poem "Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove" and discusses black identity and American culture. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward P. Jones talks about the history of slavery; Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award-winner Alice Walker explains that writing must address a worldwide crisis; and poet, spoken-word artist and activist Jayne Cortez talks about the Watts Writers' Workshop of the 1960's.

J. D. McClatchy has traveled the US visiting the homes of classic American writers. Joan Didion talks about her native California; Jonathan Lethem describes growing up in Brooklyn; and Toni Morrison describes the creation of an imaginary home, a hotel, in her most-recent novel. 

We hear from E. L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer, but the focus is on Russell Banks, a white, male, American writer, who started his career in a specific part of the world, the American Northeast. He has explored identity throughout his career, using it as a narrative tool. He believes that good writing transcends the mythology of identity....

Russell Banks, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Camille Paglia, Stephen Greenblatt, Tom Wolfe and David Mitchell In the first of this 10-part series, Escaping the Cage: Identity, Multiculturalism and Writing, we sample the range of attitudes toward identity, identity politics and multiculturalism. Among the highlights: Angelou describes an emotional encounter with Tupac Shakur, Sontag rejects self-expression as a writing goal, and Paglia embraces multiculturalism while scolding academics for losing literature in a welter of special interests...

American Linden (Tupelo) Your Time Has Come (Verse) Poets Matthew Zapruder and Joshua Beckman discuss the formation of a new literary press, Wave, and then branch out into an exploration of the improbable economics of life as a poet....

The young Jonathan Safran Foer (28) offers an even younger narrator (9) whose father died in the bombing of the World Trade Center.

Jubilant Thicket: new and selected poems (Copper Canyon) Jonathan Williams alternates between playing the role of elder statesman and that of rambunctious old cuss. You can hear it in his poetry...

Saturday (Doubleday) Ian McEwan's first book since his stunning Atonement, is one of the first novels written in response to 9/11 and worldwide threats of terrorism. It explores of the forces of order and chaos that shape contemporary society....

K. (Knopf) Roberto Calasso--scholar, publisher, polymath--delves into the works of Franz Kafka more deeply than anyone ever has. In this conversation, we explore the demonic and metaphysical elements of Kafka's world. Calasso describes one of the happier interludes in Kafka's life, in the process adding new dimensions to the word -Kafka-esque.-

In Lunar Follies (Coffee House), one of his genre-defying extravaganzas, Gilbert Sorrentino describes outlandish art shows, all of them taking place in galleries named for mountain ranges and craters of the moon...

We explore the hallucinatory intensity of Steve Erickson's visionary novel born out of the anxiety provoked by the imagined loss of a child....