Bookworm

American Woman (Harper Collins) The critics loved Susan Choi's novelization of the Patty Hearst saga, but they barely mention the book's center, told from the point of view of the Asian-American woman who helped hide Hearst and her kidnapper comrades...

The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin) Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story writer Jhumpa Lahiri defines her beliefs about writing: directness, simplicity, reality and emotional truth are her guideposts. How appropriate then that India-born Gogol, the hero of this new novel, should want to change his name....

Edmund White turns himself into Mrs. Trollope, the Victorian traveler who, in her last year, narrates a biography of her scandalous friend, the feminist Fanny Wright....

Vernon God Little (Canongate) DBC Pierre (the dark horse underdog who surprised the literary world by winning the 2003 Booker Prize) divulges the hidden workings of his rebellious Columbine-inspired novel: His narrator, a disguised St. Peter, retells Christ's story, using a uniquely profane American vernacular.

This interview, originally broadcast on March 5, 1998, will not be heard on KCRW so that we may present special holiday programming.

Over the course of his career, Edward Said produced compact and thrilling works that revolutionized the field of literary criticism. In his memory, Bookworm offers a conversation, first broadcast in 2002, in which Said talks about literature, critical theory, and exile.

Train (Doubleday)

The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday)

Where the Stress Falls (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)Where does the stress fall in the life of a writer-intellectual? Susan Sontag examines the difference between exploring the interior of a subject and exploring the interior of the explorer...

Where I Was From (Knopf) Joan Didion takes deadly aim at the dream of California embodied, for example, in her own first novel, Run River. As she takes a more discerning look, she discovers even less innocence, less altruism than the early settlers could have imagined.

And Now You Can Go (Knopf) and How to Breathe Underwater  (Vintage)

Chuck Palahniuk takes on some rather aggressive questions about American culture and the artist...

Jelly Roll (a blues) (Knopf); Blues Poems (Everyman's Library) Kevin Young, who has edited a terrific anthology of blues poetry, uses blues traditions as the basis for his own recent work...

Gazelle (Knopf) Where will the magical Rikki Ducornet take us next? In Gazelle, the Arabian Nights recur, as a thirteen -year-old girl wanders in 1950's Cairo, reveling in the scents and exotic perfumes that lead to her unusual career as an anatomist of mummies. Ducornet leads us deeper into the realm of the senses than ever before. (Note: This interview will be pre-empted on KCRW by special programming.)

The Dead Circus (Atlantic Monthly Press) John Kaye grew up in Los Angeles. His novel, The Dead Circus, is set in that city and delves beneath the surface of the classic L.A. noir thriller. What effect does all this dread and anomie have on the real people who actually live in the City of Angels?

Due Preparations for the Plague (Norton) Janette Turner Hospital's extraordinary fiction is beginning to gain recognition in America. Due Preparations for the Plague, a thrilling study of an airplane hijacking and its effects on the children of its victims, is overpowering in its intensity--generating terrifying imagery that will not easily be forgotten. In this conversation, Hospital explores how her strict religious upbringing in Australia has affected her worldview: she lusts for danger and the destruction of hierarchy.

Heidi Julavits' first book was a bleak novel. Her second book's vision is lighter, but the subject remains dark: a terrorist training cell…

The Map of Love (Vintage) London-based author Ahdaf Soueif, praised as an "Egyptian George Eliot," describes the impact of middle-eastern and global history on her narratives....

The Romantic (Metropolitan) This very intimate interview focuses on the adolescent desire for magic in romance and the adult discovery that it may not exist. The author describes her own romantic arc and discloses that, both as a writer and as a lover, she depends entirely on intuition.