Bookworm

The poetry of Cape Verdean Blues is organic, melancholic, and gorgeous. Shauna Barbosa starts with feeling, shines with honesty, and questions everything.

Joyce Carol Oates discusses A Book of American Martyrs, a novel about what women are going to make of the American dream.

Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath is a book about the nightmare of feeling not enough, Jamison travels all 360 degrees of wanting to be the best and the worst, and has a great struggle to live in the middle ground.

Rachel Kushner discusses The Mars Room, a novel set in a women’s correctional facility, a dazzling novel full of surprising details that can’t be forgotten.

Carol Muske-Dukes discusses her book, Blue Rose. The poetry is written at the highest level but it’s about daily life: poetry as life story.

Christine Schutt says her writing takes place in a danger zone. In Pure Hollywood, one novella and ten stories, she writes beyond weird, at a level that both frightens and empowers.

Devastatingly beautiful, soulful, a fulfillment of a promise to his goddaughter, Junot Diaz’s Islandborn offers a new map into children’s books.

A novel trapped in the mind of a very unusual man. Lynne Tillman writes with wit that makes the reader dance.

A transcendent apocalyptic satire, an outrageous improvisation of a book, embedded with the rhythms of American prose, Sean Penn discusses his first novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff.

Roberta Allen says every truth can work as fiction. She discusses writing into the essence of a story. The Princess of Herself is interconnected stories of familiar but monstrous people not normally written about.