Bookworm

For the first time, Louise Erdrich writes about the European side of her heritage. Her new novel is about the confrontation of German and Native American cultures in North Dakota between World Wars...

I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company (Viking) Brian Hall-s novel of Lewis and Clark turns the extraordinary expedition upside down to find its dark underside-the ignorance, racism and despair at the heart of the American wilderness adventure.

A Whistling Woman (Knopf)In the second of this two-part interview, Dame Byatt talks about the interaction of chance and design in her newly completed quartet.

A Whistling Woman (Knopf)Dame Antonia Byatt began a quartet of novels twenty years ago with The Virgin in the Garden. She completes this huge project with A Whistling Woman.

A wild and beautiful writer, Geoff Dyer goes to Rome where he "basically did nothing all day"....

Dancer (Metropolitan) Colum McCann deserts the working-class backgrounds of his Irish novels to write a fictional life of Rudolph Nureyev. He invents a dancing prose style-floating, glittering, suspended in bright air. We discover how the subject, Nureyev, taught McCann a new way to write.

The nightmare continues. After the success of Last Exit to Brooklyn, Selby pursues his bleak vision in Waiting Period...

In the first of a two-part interview, Hubert Selby, Jr, now in his seventies, reviews and relives the tumult created by his debut novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Ron Padgett tells the story of three writers who traveled from Tulsa to Manhattan and became the leaders of the second generation of the New York School of Poetry.

Jeffrey Eugenides' multi-generational novel in which a Greek-American family, replete with elements of Greek tragedy (incest, hermaphroditism), witnesses American history.

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Pantheon) In a special edition of Bookworm, Art (Maus) Spiegelman joins us to introduce Kim Deitch, -one of the best kept secrets in comics for over 35 years.- Deitch-s graphic novel is a double extravaganza-a comic about the making of animated cartoons.

In this edgy conversation, author Jonathan Franzen and his interviewer take positions, argue, reverse positions and start again...

Tell Me (Counterpoint); Why Did I Ever (Counterpoint) Mary Robison returns to her student days of writing stories for John Barth's workshop, and the days of being edited by Roger Angell, for The New Yorker, and by Gordon Lish, for book publication at Knopf. These teachers and editors both shaped and thwarted her enigmatic, instinctually accurate style...

In this moving interview, Sandra Cisneros reveals the connection between history and family history: the processes of memory....

Joyce Carol Oates' I'll Take You There (Ecco) appears to be a novel about college in the 1960s and interracial dating. At its heart, though, it pits skeptical against mystical philosophy...

The Skirt and the Fiddle (Grove) When young Egolf-s first novel, The Lord of the Barnyard, was published, he was compared to writers he-d never read or heard of. Now, his second novel, a breezier, easier book, is being compared to his first. In this conversation, we talk about the vibrant smells of both his books-a tour through the sewers and gutters of bohemia.

Summerland (Hyperion/Miramax Books) A magical conversation with Michael Chabon about children's literature...

The Book of Splendor (Norton) History, hilarity, romance and spirituality find a meeting place in the Prague of 1601. A simple Jewish orphan falls in love with a golem, and an emperor searches for the secret of eternal life: Frances Sherwood explores the path from history to fantasy, from societal regulation to sexual liberation.

The Book of Illusions (Holt) Paul Auster expresses his preference for mysterious clarity over "clever" literary effects in  The Book of Illusions, a metaphysical thriller about a mysterious filmmaker...

In the Hand of Dante (Little, Brown) Nick Tosches, a veteran tough guy, tells us what happens when the original manuscript of The Divine Comedy falls into the hands of the Mafia...