Bookworm

Booker Prize-winning author Yann Martel makes a distinction between the playful, surprise-filled surface of his novel and its spiritual purpose...

Relationships and marriage, violence and loss, houses and homes are the deeply conventional subjects that occupy this unconventional novel. In the second part of a two-part interview, Joseph McElroy shows how his oblique techniques evoke and mirror the emotional intricacies of our daily lives.

Joseph McElroy, one of the innovative masters of narrative, gives a rare two-part interview. This week, we talk about the way the novelist strives to represent the workings of consciousness, and the new techniques necessary to create a facsimile of the way memory is structured.

Sparrow (Random House)This collection of elegies for actor David Dukes, the poet's late husband, inspires a conversation about death, role-playing and ghosts. Most surprising, we discover an unexpected spectral visitation in one of the poems.

Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night (Harper Collins)A new Little Lit is always an event, and this one has work by the dreaded Lemony Snicket and a fabulous four-page Breughel-like phantasmagoria by the Where's Waldo? guy. This volume of comix for kids -- the third -- definitely does justice to its name!

Margaret Atwood on her nightmare novel about the biotechnological future...

What I Loved (Holt) A harrowing subject: the child of an artist giving way to crime, drugs and dishonesty. A harrowing conversation with author Siri Hustved: is the child's amorality genetic or did post-modern art corrupt him?

An unusually tender conversation with Alice McDermott about grace, imagined here as the act of putting others before oneself...

The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin) The Vietnamese cook in the famous Paris house of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas narrates Monique Truong's first novel...

Bay of Souls (Houghton Mifflin) Robert Stone's novel that features intrigue, romance, violence and voodoo...

Good Faith (Knopf) An ebullient book about fraud and deception-the eighties, Jane Smiley-style.

Cosmopolis (Scribner's) and The Body Artist (Scribner's) In this, the second of a two-part interview, Don DeLillo explores his most enigmatic creation: the weird gnome at the heart of his last novel, The Body Artist.

The deadpan master of post-modern dysfunction-comedy takes an ordinary New York traffic jam and transforms it into a funeral procession that guides his protagonist to defeat and death. 

A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (Harper Collins) A young doctor who has worked in developing countries, John Murray has written a collection of stories in which chaos and order wrestle for domination...

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin-s) Kate Moses attempts and achieves the impossible: she weaves Sylvia Plath-s imagery and intensity into an interior landscape illuminating the last week of the great poet-s life. In the process, Moses creates a convincing portrait of a hypothetical Plath-one who has earned a mastery of her demons and a place in the Pantheon.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead) With her extraordinarily confident language, newcomer ZZ Packer confronts issues of race, class and education that have flummoxed more-experienced writers...

The Hazards of Good Breeding (Norton) Jessica Shattuck skewers the narrow-minded prejudices of the Boston aristocracy. How did Shattuck, the daughter of a liberal lawyer and niece of a prominent literary critic, find the tenderness and insight necessary to give her characters human depth?

This remarkable anthology presents a picture of what the American essay is, and what, with any luck, it may become.   

Pattern Recognition (Putnam) William Gibson, the inventor of cyber-punk, says that his new novel, though set in the future, is realistic...

The Spooky Art (Random House) Norman Mailer, the lion at eighty, stayed lair-bound long enough to assemble this collection of his thoughts about writing..