Bookworm

Damascus Gate (Houghton Mifflin). Robert Stone explores the underlying holiness of all faith--from the fanatic's to the mystic's, from the con-man's to the addict's...

Dorothy Allison, author of Cavedweller (Dutton). Dorothy Allison's arrival as a significant voice in mainstream American fiction provokes questions of identity and the limits of truthfulness. How far can she go?

Timothy O'Grady author of I Could Read the Sky (Harvill). A collaborative novel consisting of prose by Tim O'Grady and photographs by Steve Pike, I Could Read the Sky is a devastating account of the lives of Irish workers in England. O'Grady explores his own uprooted nature and how he discovered his &quotvoice.;"

A Tribute to Julio Cort---r. Stephen Kessler, the translator of Save Twilight (City Lights), the first volume of Cort---r's poetry to appear in English, discusses the great South American fabulist--his life, his lunacy, his politics, his surrealism, and his cat.

The fictionalized life of abolitionist Frederick Douglass is the jumping-off point for a conversation about the white writer's contribution to a  discussion of race....

The Smithsonian Institution (Random House) The urbane Gore Vidal on the emotional center of his newest "invention"...

Aharon Appelfeld, author of The Iron Tracks (Schocken). The Israeli writer reveals the story behind the writing of his newest novel, a fable about the life of a concentration camp survivor who obsessively revisits the scenes of his imprisonment.

Alice McDermott's prose captures the suburban Irish-American family. How does her dense, constricted, complex writing-style reflect the lives of these everyday folk?

Jim Crase, author of Quarantine (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This novel of faith by an atheist follows Jesus through his forty-day fast in the desert. It is a rare accomplishment--a realistic novel about a miracle worker, a farce about devotion.

Night Train (Crown) Suicide is the solution to the mystery in Martin Amis' noir thriller with existentialist undercurrents.