Bookworm

The Last Novel (Shoemaker & Hoard)David Markson has invented his own "personal genre." His novels present collaged panoramas of the travails of art and artists—the bad reviews, the rivalries, the life-long neglect, the impoverished deaths. His juxtapositions can be comic or tragic.

Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 (Scribner)Annie Proulx's new collection is a stew of tall tales, romantic sagebrush sagas, and genuinely affecting stories of survival on the range. * Language Advisory

Camille de Toledo: Coming of Age at the End of History (Soft Skull)The young French critic, novelist and filmmaker Camille de Toledo tells the sad /exuberant story of young French intellectuals growing up at the end of everything.

Sylvia Whitman, of Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore popular with Americans in Paris Francois Cusset French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (University of Minnesota Press) Our tour begins at Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore with a long tradition of helping American writers in Paris. Then, it's on to François Cusset and how French Theory found its bastion and stronghold in American Universities.  

A tribute to the great (and virtually unknown) Swiss writer Robert Walser, who influenced Kafka and inspired Hermann Hesse. Writers Susan Bernofsky, Deborah Eisenberg and Wayne Koestenbaum read, discuss and worship Walser, a writer who is like a mouse that roared—small and fragile but out-of-this-world outrageous

Editor of Toon Books Françoise Mouly describes the new children's books she's bringing into the world...

Knockemstiff (Doubleday)Knockemstiff, Ohio, inspires Donald Ray Pollock to explore the miseries and ferocities of small-town life.

Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!  (Pantheon)A sneak preview of the new Art Spiegelman book, which collects Art's early underground commix and includes his next autobiographical sequence...

A wonderful young novelist, Andrew Sean Greer, writes about enormous and basic truths that his characters choose to conceal...

In this new novel, Salman Rushdie explores Renaissance Florence and the reign of Akbar in India, in order to describe a world on the verge of discovering that all its beliefs are incorrect...