Bookworm

Seventy sonnets written in the first two hundred days of Trump's presidency, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, by Terrance Hayes, flies out of the cages of literary, cultural, and historical forms. Warning: Today's episode contains strong language that some listeners may find offensive. 

The stories in Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, try to capture what’s human in what otherwise may only be trends.

Her fourth book, which took her six years to write, An American Marriage brought Tayari Jones to the attention of Oprah’s Book Club. 

John Lanchester’s The Wall is a wild love story with a dystopian backdrop.

In Nathan Englander’s kaddish.com, a secular Jewish son experiments with the task of shepherding his father’s soul safely to rest.

Chris Cander’s The Weight of a Piano explores characters with passionate attachments to things that have been lost. 

Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive tells the story of a family by combining the American road trip subgenre with the Latin American tradition of an inward journey. 

Her nature oppositional, Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway is a sad, funny, hilarious, and melancholic novel.

In Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, a mother discovers a place where she can talk to her son who committed suicide.

Marlon James discusses the endlessly beautiful and brutal world of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first novel in The Dark Star Trilogy.