Bookworm

Sherman Alexie The Toughest Indian in the World (Grove Atlantic) Sherman Alexie is the cynical, irreverent Indian writer (he does not use the term Native American) whose rough, funny stories have led to more than one brush with the tribal elders. Hear him laugh at the kind of people who romanticize &quotthe; rez."

Zadie Smith White Teeth (Random House) Young Zadie Smith's dizzying comic take on multi-racial London. Her background, she says, was so mixed that P.G. Wodehouse's pure-bloods seemed to her to be foreign and &quotexotic.;"

NOTE: Poet Mark Strand has died at the age of 80. He was a Pulitzer prize-winning poet and Poet Laureate of the United States. He appeared on Bookworm in 2000. A brow-furrowing conversation with a former poet laureate Mark Strand...

Horse Heaven (Knopf) At a gallop, Jane Smiley tells us everything she knows about horse breeding, horse racing, horse trading...

Blue Angel pivots on a question of academic sexual harassment...

J.R. Salamanca That Summer's Trance (Welcome Rain Press) Salamanca's first book in fourteen years, That Summer's Trance, a shimmering book about love, desire and betrayal, bears the erotic imprint and the tragic sense of life that readers first encountered in his classic novel Lilith

Little Lit: Folklore and Fairy Tale Funnies (Harper Collins)Author Art Spiegelman and editor Francoise Mouly introduce Little Lit, their new collection of comics by world-renowned children's book artists and underground cartoonists-all based on fairy tales, all for kids, all in color and beautiful beyond belief.

Our Heartbreaking Group of Staggering Geniuses comes to its conclusion with "Grandmaster" Wallace: a conversation about difficulty , gender, transgression and the use of received ideas-all earmarks of staggering genius.

In George Saunder's dystopian theme parks, the American Dream festers and thrives fertilized by self-help movements and Big Brother type cults.

Bret Easton Ellis Glamorama (Knopf) Ellis, a godfather to the new fiction scene, describes what it-s like to have one foot in each of two generations. He comes from the minimalists (the Raymond Carver gang), but his recent book, Glamorama, is a step in the new direction--complex, ironic, deconstructive, maximalist.