Bookworm

The Fall of Heartless Horse by Martha Kinney (Akashic); Grab Bag by Derek McCormack (Akashic) Two young writers and their editor tell about their new books for a new publishing house: McKinney, in the style of a Scottish border ballad, chronicles the fall of a suburban family, while McCormack employs wicked understatement to celebrate a depraved childhood...

Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (Pantheon) Firebrand Paglia devotes her energies to a vibrant demonstration of how to read poetry, attacking the theorists who've made understanding a poem preposterously complex, and passionately defending the poems she's chosen that represent poetry at its greatest....

Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)In the second part of our conversation, we explore the historical and social forces that shape Marilynne Robinson's narrator, John Ames, and, by extension, the Protestant Church...

Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)The loveliness of life, life itself as a blessing, is the subject of Marilynne Robinson's beautiful book. In this first of a two-part conversation, we discuss her narrator, a preacher, and his troubled relations with the world and the people around him.

A wizard of a storyteller, Greenblatt combines prodigious historical research and encyclopedic knowledge to conjure a vision of life and love in Elizabethan England.

Heir to the Glimmering World (Houghton Mifflin)Eccentric and beautiful, Cynthia Ozick's novel is about an immigrant family's attempts to preserve a dying esoteric tradition....

The Pacific and Other Stories (Penguin) Mark Helprin's critics--who mainly regard him as a political conservative and, therefore, a traitor to imaginative literature--have made him into a martyr. Here, he fends off the slings and arrows to say what he believes a writer to be, and describes the values he wants his work to embrace.

Joy Williams, specialist in what should be called sorrowful hilarity, reads from her work Honored Guest. Pretty soon we discover that what we would call a sacrificial victim, she calls an honored guest...

How We Are Hungry: Stories (McSweeney-s) Dave Eggers begins by describing his book as an object (it-s designed to look like a Moleskine Journal). From there, we jump to the idea of stories as entries, improvs, breaking the rules as they go. Then, of course, we go on to influences Monty Python, Donald Barthelme, and, and, and...

The Volcano LoverNovelist, essayist and driving intellectual force, Susan Sontag, died late last year. In her memory, we offer this conversation, first broadcast in October 1992. On this first visit to Bookworm, she spoke with great enthusiasm about her novel, The Volcano Lover and how she came to write -- of all things -- a romance.

Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) A a single, perfectly placed phrase brings an essay about the death of August Kleinzahler's brother to a heart-breaking, unforgettable conclusion...

The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury) Allan Hollinghurst-s Booker Prize-winning novel pits the aesthetic sensibility against the deprivations of Margaret Thatcher-s London-here seen as the protagonist-s largely frustrated war against ingrained social gay-bashing.

The more closely you investigate Russell Banks' powerful new novel, The Darling, the stranger it becomes. Set in Liberia, it explores its heroine's narcissistic wound....

Snow (Knopf) Turkey's preeminent novelist, Orhan Pamuk, has decided to write a political novel-without a political agenda. The result resembles -- but not quite -- the great metaphysical novels he's written previously...

The Stone Fields (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Courtney Angela Brkic recruited her forensic skills to help exhume and identity bodies from besieged villages in Bosnia. She is American born, of Serbo-Croatian lineage. This conversation, then, is about the pain of ancestral memory and the consequences of direct contact with the dead.

Birds without Wings (Knopf) In a conversation about the birth of the conflicts that beset us, Louis de Bernières (Corelli's Mandolin) talks about a Turkish village where difference is so ordinary that a Muslim religious leader can ask a Catholic priest for advice...

Tijuana Straits (Scribner) The inventor of "surf-noir," Kem Nunn, describes how the evil of the world offers an opportunity for a writer of thrillers to structure a tale of redemption.

Country of Origin (Norton) Multi-racial ethnicity underlies the mystery in this literary thriller by Korean-American writer Don Lee, who spent much of his childhood first in Japan and then in Korea....

The Shadow of the Wind (Penguin)Spaniard Carlos Ruiz Zafón discusses the way he utilizes "modern narrative technologies" to re-tool the traditional novel and create a work filled with history, terror and love--but also with uncertainty, deconstruction and despair.

The greatest living writer of prose in English explores his deepest influence: Rainer Maria Rilke. In this conversation, we witness the interpretation of two modern masters.