Bookworm

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (Vintage)How does the creative person function in a market culture? In the 25 years since The Gift was first published, this question has become increasingly more difficult to answer.

Sorry, Tree (Wave Books) and Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press) and Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press) Critic David Lehman has called the New York School of Poetry "the Last Avant Garde." Poet and critic Maggie Nelson suggests it might better be considered "one of the first gay avant gardes," since its original members included Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and James Schuyler. We examine the role of women in the New York School: Barbara Guest, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer and Eileen Myles. How did these women pave the way for today's women poets, who, like Maggie Nelson, are conscious of gender and its effects on poetry?

Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005 (Ecco) If it can still be said that a poet can have a humanizing influence on his culture, Robert Hass is such a poet. Here, as we discuss the poems in his National Book Award-winning collection, the beautiful, moving humanity of Hass' voice emerges, making us wish we were better people.

Lost Paradise (Grove) In this duel of interpretations, Dutch writer Nooteboom (who has been repeatedly shortlisted for the Nobel Prize) shows the whipper-snapper Michael Silverblatt that there are simpler, clearer, realer reasons for the angels in Lost Paradise than the over-interpreting Silverblatt wants to believe.

Oliver Sacks explores the brain's affinity for music by examining the extraordinary ways our brains adapt in response to musical aberrations. 

The Reserve (Harper)Russell Banks, one of the great living American novelists, uses the 1930's novel of passion and betrayal -- with its allied seductions, madness, and adultery -- to explore America's class system; the relationships between art, politics and wealth; and the despoiling of the American Landscape. (An abridged version of this interview will be heard live on KCRW due to our semi-annual subscription drive. It will be archived in its entirety online.)

Did Stephen Crane attempt to write a gay companion piece to his Maggie: A Girl of the Streets? Literary rumor says he tried. At any rate, now Edmund White has written it for him. 

This big, hilarious and joyful book has been twenty-five years in the making. Fran Lebowitz called it "The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization set to music."

ABC (Pantheon) In this novel, a series of unlinked personal, familial and global catastrophes leads unrelated victims to search for order. Mysteriously, the "order" they discover is alphabetical order. So many cultures begin their alphabets with ABC. Why? What revelation is concealed in the alphabet's code?

The family in Ann Patchett's Run unites rich with poor, black with white. The novel is a thriller—but the mystery at its heart is the mystery of spiritual grace...