Bookworm

Book of My Nights (BOA Editions) Li-Young Lee's poetry has moved beyond the details of his Chinese upbringing to an investigation of what he calls "primal silence..."  

Dan Chaon, Among the Missing (Ballantine); Adrienne Sharp, White Swan, Black Swan (Random House) Marisa Silver, Babe in Paradise (Norton) Three young writers, each publishing a first book with a major press, explore the terrain of contemporary short-story writing, from personal backgrounds to their desires to break with tradition...

Fearless Jones (Little Brown) Walter Mosley is best known for his noir mysteries. With books set in the black communities of Los Angeles, he writes the hidden histories of race, sensuality, crime and cultural aspiration....

Silent Extras (St. Martin's) The young Dutch writer who created a sensation in Europe with his first novel, a sort of Amsterdam-set Catcher in the Rye, talks about the perils of recognition and his continuing need to evade seriousness. Read an excerpt from this book.

Bel Canto (Harper Collins) Ann Patchett knows that a novel is an author's private kingdom-problems the world can't solve can be solved within the pages of a book...

Carry Me Across the Water (Random House) Ethan Canin offers his ideas about fatherhood, memory and the betrayal children inevitably feel at the hands of their parents...

How to Be Good (Riverhead) Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, has made a shift: the gifted comic novelist has adopted a woman's voice to examine marriage, fidelity, happiness and, finally, moral goodness.

Life after Death (Random House)Carol Muske-Dukes began to write a dark comedy about death. Slowly, she discovered that compassion was reshaping her book, giving it depth and complexity...

Three Apples Fell from Heaven (Riverhead) Micheline Aharonian Marcom's stunning first novel imagines the Armenian genocide...

If in Time, Collected Poems 1975-2000 (Penguin) Ann Lauterbach believes that one of the primary functions of poetry is the demystification of the world's cliches and the creation of new wonders...

Blake's Therapy (7 Stories Press) Ariel Dorfman describes his goal: to subvert the techniques of melodrama and thriller-writing in order to penetrate illusion and arrive at reality with a capital R.

The Tether (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Pastoral (Gray Wolf) Strongly influenced by the Metaphysical poets, Carl Phillips writes a mixture of erotic and devotional poetry...

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (Harper Collins) Louise Erdrich mixes elements of her German and Native American ancestry to create a collage of history, mythology and good old-fashioned storytelling....

Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Norton) John Felstiner has produced a superb translation of works by the great Holocaust poet Paul Celan...

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House)Nicholson Baker has been on a crusade to preserve intact our books and newspapers. In Double Fold, he exposes the efforts of some of the greatest enemies of paper.

Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong (Copper Canyon Press) Ho Xuan Huong was an 18th century Vietnamese poet and concubine. Poet John Balaban served as a conscientious objector in Vietnam during the war. We explore the complex destinies that led him to learn Vietnamese and to translate Ho's complex, erotic poems.

The Best of Jackson Payne (Knopf) A conversation with author Jack Fuller, who happens to be the president of the Tribune Publishing Company, and Steve Wasserman, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, about concern journalistic ethics, conflicts of interest, and art.

The Glass Palace (Random House)Amitav Ghosh's ambitions are Tolstoyan. He chronicles the tragedies of the British Empire in India and Burma. His mission: to reconcile large historical themes with his novelistic interest in the intimate details of personal destiny.

Woodcuts of Women (Grove) Dagoberto Gilb's stories have enormous poetic vitality, yet he feels that he suffers from a lack of recognition. Has his status as a Latino inhibited his acceptance by the literary establishment?

Father of the Four Passages (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) In this novel, the distance between autobiography and fiction is minimal. Lois-Ann Yamanaka is living with the problems of raising an autistic child; she has written about the struggle. Does writing help?