Bookworm

The Bonesetter's Daughter (Putnam) During the writing of The Bonesetter's Daughter, Amy Tan endured both the death of her mother and the death of her editor...

Sweet Hearts (Houghton Mifflin)Melanie Rae Thon's new novel is very strange: it's narrated by a woman who cannot hear and has not witnessed the events she describes. Her condition inspires our conversation about suffering, grace and the presence of God.

The Death of Vishnu (Norton) In his first novel, Manil Suri reenacts the Bhagavad-Gita in modern Bombay....

Guess Again (Simon & Schuster) Bernard Cooper explores the temptations he faces in his writing: a yearning for permanence and security rivaled by a sneaking affection for odd, transient and unique experiences...

Expressing outright admiration for this new collection of stories, Bookworm attempts to pin down Ann Beattie's elusive techniques...

Matthew Klam discusses the sexcapades of the stud muffins and alleycats of his post-moral stories, truly the most audacious chronicle of sexual discomfort since the stories of John O'Hara...

Jerome Rothenberg, editor A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections About the Book and Writing (Granary) Who knows what books will look like ten years from now! While e-books and new technologies loom, poet, anthologist and ethnopoeticist Jerome Rothenberg offers alternative ways to think about books: as sacred objects, storage machines, objects d'art.

Richard Powers' intensity and sincerity blaze through as he discusses science, personal sacrifice and the common mis-assumption that cerebral writers are without passion.

Ursula LeGuin The Telling (Harcourt Brace) Ursula Le Guin believes that science fiction writers create new worlds in order to understand this one. We discuss the death of literacy and the use of religious fanaticism to limit civil rights in her world of the future. Read about this Book

Off Keck Road (Knopf) Mona Simpson's delicately textured and beautifully detailed novella about small-town life in Wisconsin provides the occasion for this conversation about women, romance and the decision not to marry.

Bodies in Motion and at Rest (Norton) As a result of his two professions (poet and funeral director), Thomas Lynch has an unusual attitude toward tradition, decorum and memory...

Eduardo Galeano's denunciation of our multinational globalized future is characteristically brilliant, whimsical-devastating. 

The comic book, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon), is Bookworm's nominee for the past year's most interesting novel!

The Golden Age (Doubleday) With the completion of his American Empire series, author Gore Vidal reflects upon our national destiny...

The Royal Family (Viking) William Vollmann's growing sense of mystical Christianity is bringing him closer to Dostoevsky...

In Joy Williams' The Quick and the Dead, bleak and wicked comedy hides the book's religious mission, demonstrating how God and Devil can be mistaken for one another...

Bee Season (Doubleday) This is Myla Goldberg's haunting first novel, about a Jewish family torn apart by manias born of spiritual mysticism on the one hand, and fear and silence on the other....

The Bridegroom (Pantheon) Ha Jin, a Chinese writer who came to America in 1985, has published seven books of fiction and poetry in English. What are the consequences of giving up a native language? Can writing transform the anger generated by the Cultural Revolution into art?

This remarkable first novel offers an occasion to pay tribute to its late editor, and to salute its young author, whose imagery and vision promise an unusual career.

Jim the Boy (Little Brown) Tony Earley has been hailed as a new American master, and, indeed, he has written a classic rite-of-passage novel...