Bookworm

Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Dalkey Archive)  This new anthology makes clear that magical realism is only a tiny segment of what’s been happening in Mexican fiction over the last half-century. In this conversation with its editor, Álvaro Uribe, and Cristina Rivera-Garza, one of the writers whose work appears in the book, we uncover a cavalcade of styles and influences, as well as a host of writers whose names will be new to American readers.  

Road Show, a recording of the musical (Nonesuch, PS Classics) Stephen Sondheim is right — his new musical, Roadshow, is not gloomy. Sondheim and his collaborator, playwright John Weidman, discuss the many revisions of the musical that has evolved in an extraordinary way, and may yet become an American classic...

How to Sell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Clancy Martin's first novel reads like a piece of sleaze, but it turns out — surprise! — to be a philosophical novel about the problems of appearance and reality...

Let the Great World Spin (Random House) Darkened by intimations of 9/11, Column McCann's generous extravaganza of a novel brings together the lives of strangers who witness a high-wire artist dancing between the two World Trade Center towers...

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Penguin Press) Reif Larsen's T. S. Spivet, twelve-year-old genius cartographer, compulsively maps everything...

Sunnyside (Knopf)What a charming raconteur Glen David Gold is, with his anecdotes about the movies, theories about identity and celebrity, and knowledge of World War I...

Eduardo Galeano has written a history of the world in brief chapters, each one devoted to an iconic incident...

Erased  (Tin House Books) In this wild and woolly conversation, Jim Krusoe reveals that his zany, unpredictable, hilarity-inspiring novels are, well, descriptions of the human condition (at least as how he sees it).

Manatee /Humanity (Penguin Poets) Anne Waldman guides us through this book-length poetry-and-prose meditation on endangered species by describing an initiation ceremony designed to instill a deeper sense of compassion....

Lowboy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) John Wray's novel about a schizophrenic boy's quest for sex and/or love flirts violently with the thriller form...