Marisha Pessl
Special Topics in Calamity Physics: A Novel (Viking)
While Marisha Pessl's first novel has a bright and witty narrative voice, it has mysterious depths and a hidden Nabokovian counterstructure. We explore the author's ambitions and her decision to keep the book's secrets well-hidden.
Aired Thursday, October 26, 2006. [MORE]
Andrew Holleran
Grief (Hyperion)
Andrew Holleran has written a beautiful, somber novella about loss. His narrator has come to Washington, D.C. (the white mausoleum city) to teach a course about AIDS literature. He is grieving the death of his mother and finds solace in the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln. In this conversation, we discuss the book's essential theme: the possibility of living in a state of permanent grief.
Read an excerpt from the book.
Aired Thursday, October 19, 2006. [MORE]
Chris Kraus
Torpor [Semiotext(e)]
Chris Kraus takes her aim at the traditional bourgeois novel about marriage and family and delivers a book full of bullet-holes: the death of the novel, the fall of Europe, the end of the family, devastation of the arts. What is left standing? A battle-scarred but indefatigably hopeful I-Love-Lucy-esque Chris Kraus.
Read an excerpt from the book.
Aired Thursday, October 12, 2006. [MORE]
Mark Z. Danielewski
Only Revolutions (Pantheon)
There's no mistaking a novel by Mark Danielewski for any other. This new one can be read forward, backward and upside down. It has multi-colored inks; two sewn-in bookmarks (green and gold); and a circular structure. Here, we explore how the book's design reflects the joy-ride/killing spree of its two perpetual teenagers as they careen through time and space.
Aired Thursday, October 5, 2006. [MORE]
Wole Soyinka
You Must Set Forth at Dawn (Random House)
The Nobel prize-winning African playwright explores the myths of exile and return that underlie his most recent memoir. He contrasts European and African cosmologies, and describes his passionate activism as a quest influence by the gods.
Read an excerpt from the book.
Aired Thursday, September 28, 2006. [MORE]
John Updike, Part 2
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Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels (Everyman's Library)
A New York Times poll indicated that Updike's quartet of Rabbit novels is one of the five most important achievements in fiction in the past quarter century. Here, Updike agrees that the books represent the peak of his attainment, and he reminisces about his creation of Rabbit Angstrom and his decision to kill him off at the end of the 20th century.
Aired Thursday, September 21, 2006. [MORE]
John Updike, Part I
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[Listen]
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Terrorist (Knopf)
The subject of John Updike's recent bestseller required that he contrast his own reliance on faith with the more violent faith of a young Islamic terrorist. This conversation explores the dark side of empathy and identification.
Read an excerpt from the book.
Aired Thursday, September 14, 2006. [MORE]
Stacey Levine
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Frances Johnson (Clear Cut Press)
Using the model of the "nurse romances" of the 1950's, Stacey Levine has concocted a small-town romance--with a difference. The undercurrents of sexuality, repression and gender uncertainty rise to create flood tides. We discuss the nightmarish emissions from the unconscious that rock this seemingly placid novel.
Read an excerpt from the book.
Aired Thursday, September 7, 2006. [MORE]
W. S. Merwin
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Present Company (Copper Canyon); Summer Doorways (Shoemaker and Hoard)
For his first visit to Bookworm, the eminent American poet, W. S. Merwin, explores the sequence of odes in which he addresses everything from inanimate objects to his own soul. 
He befriends both the external and the internal worlds with a serenity that represents the culmination of a lifetime in poetry.
Aired Thursday, August 31, 2006. [MORE]
Uzodinma Iweala
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[Listen]
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Beasts of No Nation (Harper Collins)
Forcing himself to inhabit the terrifying heart of amorality and violence, Iweala has created the first-person voice of a child-soldier. Here, he speaks of how, with inspiration from Rimbaud and Fela Kuti, and guidance from Jamaica Kincaid, he arrived at the disturbing poetry of this powerful first novel.
Read an excerpt from the book.
Aired Thursday, August 24, 2006. [MORE]
Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly
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Big Fat Little Lit (Puffin)
Back by popular demand! Editors Spiegelman and Mouly talk about how they recruited and supervised the many artists and writers who created these “comics for kids.” The occasion? A huge anthology of those comics, all in one volume for the first time.
Aired Thursday, August 17, 2006. [MORE]
Carlos Fuentes
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The Eagle's Throne (Random House)
Carlos Fuentes casts a satiric eye on Mexican politics and, by extension, on global politics, skewering the art of politics in its entirety. Fuentes takes it all on, from Mexico City to Washington, D. C. Aired Thursday, August 10, 2006. [MORE]
Joyce Carol Oates
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[Listen]
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High Lonesome: Stories 1966-2006 (Ecco)
When you've written as many stories as Joyce Carol Oates, the process of choosing just sixty of them for an omnibus is daunting. Here, Oates explores those choices and--from forty years of experience--draws some conclusions about short-story writing.
Read an excerpt from the book.
Aired Thursday, August 3, 2006. [MORE]
T.C. Boyle
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Talk Talk (Viking)When T. C. Boyle sits down to write a thriller, none of the usual rules apply. He starts with a young deaf woman, a computer animator and an identity thief and creates a novel about communication. We explore some of the buried connections that take him beyond the thriller form into an exploration of the things that keep human identity intact.
Aired Thursday, July 27, 2006. [MORE]