Bookworm

Night Soul and Other Stories (Dalkey Archive Press)Joseph McElroy is well regarded as one of the most demanding living American writers. His work is usually innovative and difficult. But in this collection of short stories, his first, stories of tenderness, often about care for children, predominate.

How can writing provide consolation? Writer Isabel Allende talks about her daughter's death and the events and feelings that led to the publication of this memoir.

The novels of T.C. Boyle are well known for addressing complex concerns about the environment and endangered species. In this brief interview, we prepare for the February publication of Boyle's most exciting environmental novel, When the Killing's Done.

The Lover's Dictionary (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) David Levithan has written a dictionary for lovers. The entries in it could apply to any romantic relationship, and yet, as you will hear in this conversation, the specificity of the entries gives the characters unanticipated depth.

Caribu Island (Harper Collins) David Vann builds his first novel out of dire materials: his father took his own life, and his stepmother's parents died in a murder/suicide...

Luka and the Fire of Life (Random House) Once again, Salman Rushdie writes a fable, this time for his second son, who has had the time to take in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and feel envy for his brother to whom that book was dedicated...

Selected Poems (Wave Books)When you hear Mary Ruefle reading her poems, you will quickly become entranced by their accessibility: they are funny and heartbreaking—simultaneously...

Lord of Misrule (McPherson) Jaimy Gordon is a recently-discovered American novelist with an original voice and vision. Her National Book Award-winning novel, Lord of Misrule, is set at Indian Mound Downs, a rinky-dink racetrack in Wheeling, West Virginia, a place where "scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain" dream of better luck someday....

Great House (Norton) Nicole Krauss is more sensitive to emotional textures and to characters than she is to conventional plot. Here, she speaks about how the careful maneuverings of feelings and the details that provoke feeling help to generate a structure for her new novel.

The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir ( Viking) The Sonoran desert, its creatures and features, its ants and plants, becomes the classroom for that most trans-human of lessons. Poet, novelist and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko provides a memoir of her education outdoors.