Bookworm

A. L. Kennedy &quotOriginal; Sin" (Knopf) The first American publication ofthis lively and quirky member of the new Scottish renaissance. Talk aboutthe war between the sexes! Better yet, talk about a powerful new voice.

Re-imagining Shakespeare's life as a high-flying farce in Shakespeare in Love. We talk about gender, comedic structure and challenge of putting Shakespeare on the screen.

The new editor of the New Yorker on the techniques of the profile. How does one journalist master sports writing for his book on Ali, having won a Pulitzer for his anatomy of the new Russia?

A Man in Full (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) As a New Journalist, Tom Wolfe infiltrated sub-cultures: the Merry Pranksters,U.S. Astronauts, New York painters. In his novels, he aims for the bigpicture -- the whole cultural machine...

Cathleen Schine &quotThe; Evolution of Jane" (Holt) A comedy of manners turns into a nightmare of subjectivity. Cathleen Schine on moving from third-to-first person narration-that is, from manners to madness.

Charity (Doubleday) An extended metaphor describes Mark Richard's fiction: the world as a charity ward where the deformed, the anguished and the damned seek rescue--or is it redemption?

The Museum Guard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Howard Norman has won awards for his extraordinary, quiet fiction, but he has rarely discussed its meanings...

The Letters of Mina Hacher (Hard Press) Post-modern feminism! Deconstructed Gothic horror! A character from Bram Stoker's Dracula meets the San Francisco literary scene...  

Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal (Norton). An Arctic expedition provides the setting for a confrontation between a reticent man of science and a raging egoist.

Michael Byers, author of The Coast of Good Intentions (Houghton Mifflin). This young short-story writer makes a really impressive debut. A look at his landscape (Washington state's coastline) and his influences (&quotsteal; from the best").