Bookworm

On Summer in Baden Baden by Leonid Tsypkin (New Directions)Susan Sontag talks about the discovery of lost and forgotten masterpieces, in particular, this novel, never published in America, about an odd vacation in the life of Fyodor Dostoevski...

Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids (Harper Collins) Spiegelman and Mouly discuss their exciting treat for kids of all ages-the newest Little Lit, with weird illustrated tales by the likes of Paul Auster, Maurice Sendak and Jules Feiffer.

The Grand Complication (Hyperion) A genuinely odd discussion about the consequences of scholarly book-loving. That is, a conversation about manipulation, games-playing, sexual repression and sadism in the lives of Kurzweil's characters who continue their unwholesome adventures beyond the intrigues and enigmas of his first novel, A Case of Curiosities.

The Feast of the Goat (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) In Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant novel about the Trujillo regime, the Dominican Republic stands for all tyrannized nations and the 1960's stand for any period of political domination and unrest...

Allan Gurganus talks intimately about the people who introduced him to art and literature during his childhood.

Isabel Allende on war, love, autobiography, patriarchy, feminism and sex.

Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Pantheon); The Said Reader (Vintage) A passionate conversation about exile, literature and critical theory. Palestinian-born Edward Said discusses his work: from his early philosophical criticism, through critique of imperialism, to his recent memoir.

The inventor of a new style of lyrical essay writing, John D'Agata talks about the classical traditions he draws upon and the special American loneliness that resonates in his unusual sentences...    

The Soul of Rumi (Harper San Francisco) Rumi's ancient mystical poetry swings between ideals of transcendence and destruction. Coleman Barks explores the extreme polarities that underlie the work...

When The Corrections appeared, it was immediately nominated as a candidate for The Great American Novel. Jonathan Franzen discusses his manner of writing, his method of construction, and the possibility that his book advocates a family values-based neo-conservatism.

Austerlitz (Random House)What Thomas Mann was to the 1940's and Albert Camus to the 1950's probably places the German writer W. G. Sebald in relation to our new century. In this conversation, Sebald describes the source of his rare prose tone and explores the invisible presence of the concentration camps in his work.

Political Fictions (Knopf) We discover that the strategy underlying Joan Didion's essays also provides the foundation for her fiction. She rejects the human need for stories with clear resolutions and, instead, searches out the messy realities that stories conceal.

Death of a River Guide (Grove) In this novel, a drowning river-guide in Tasmania relives his life as it recedes before him. Author Richard Flanagan insists that reality in his island homeland is stranger still...

David Means, the young winner of the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award discusses his interest in redemption, an impulse that transforms his tightly calibrated realistic fiction into a moral tightrope-walk.

Little America (Knopf) Author Henry Bromell, the son of a CIA agent, discusses the traps, secrets and patricidal rivalries that can turn father-son relationships into metaphors for espionage...

Coming Soon!!!  (Houghton Mifflin) More on the spectacular fictional inventions of John Barth-including dual narrators, Muse-author collaborations, and stories so complexly interconnected that they mirror the spiraling structure of the universe. (Part II of a two-part interview)

Coming Soon!!! (Houghton Mifflin) A full-scale celebration of the career of John Barth, one of America's greatest comic writers. His experiments with form, his crazy circumlocutions and contractions of language and, in particular, his creation of double-gendered narration are explored, explained, exhibited and exclaimed over.(Part I of a two-part interview)

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Houghton Mifflin) With the film of Lord of the Rings hard upon us, Professor Shippey recalls Tolkien and his interest in language and epic poetry. As a special treat, Shippey sings Tolkien's school song, which, disguised, makes its way into the Sagas of Middle Earth.

In part two of this interview with Salman Rushdie, we consider the wilder aspects of Fury: the influence of science fiction, surrealism and film. Special attention is paid to the blurring distinction between humans and machines and the painful irony implicit in the difficulty of making such a distinction. (Part one aired October 4.) 

In the first of a two-part interview, Salman Rushdie explores the politics, psychology and sociology of his first America-set novel, Fury.