Bookworm

In a culture whose major activities include consumption and the production of waste, John D'Agata ponders the adjacency of Las Vegas and a proposed nuclear waste dumping ground...

Elif Batuman never intended to study literature, learn Russian,or learn to speak Uzbek. That's no life for a grown up!. And yet she fell passionately in love with literature...

Planisphere (Ecco) John Ashbery has made a dumbfounding statement: he is afraid that sometimes "the language gets in the way of the music of a poem."  This is dumbfounding because what is there in poetry other than language?

Union Atlantic (Doubleday)While Adam Haslett's new novel tracks the underground movements of big money and global management, he still has his novelist's eye on the intimacies, even the perversities, of eccentric individuals...

The Unnamed (Little, Brown) Josh Ferris, who won a huge audience with his hilarious office novel, Then We Came to the End, has done an about-face — he's left the office....

New Directions, the press that began by publishing Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Tennessee Williams and which today gives us Roberto Bolaño, W. G. Sebald and Anne Carson, deserves celebration. Editor in Chief Barbara Epler takes us on a guided tour of American’s pre-eminent literary publisher...

Silk Parachute (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)John McPhee, our nation’s premier essayist—the man who helped raise creative non-fiction to an art form—speaks about the intricacy of his writing process...

Just Kids (Ecco) In the second of this two-part interview we hear about Patti Smith as a bookworm. You probably know about her love for Rimbaud, but did you know she worships the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov and his great novel, The Master and Margarita? A voracious reader, Smith has written three unpublished novels and has created hundreds of visual pieces. She speaks of her unbounded appetite for creativity.

Just Kids (Ecco) Poverty and insanity are terrible things—but then there is bohemian poverty and insanity, and these are infused with the romance of becoming an artist. In the first of this two-part interview, Patti Smith speaks of her youth in New York, when she and Robert Mapplethorpe sought to manifest their artistic ambitions...

Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (New Directions)Our conversation with Javier Marías continues. What if ten minutes of espionage took a hundred pages to fully describe? Here we explore time and consciousness in what will possibly be the greatest trilogy of our new century.