Bookworm

This conversation provides a mini-course in short-story writing, George Saunders-style and explores the construction of short fiction from the ground up.

Channeling Mark Twain (Random House)This novel revives the belief that poetry has a close connection to personal and political liberation.

Steve Erickson's breakthrough novel Zeroville is about the The Movies — not the movie business, not the wheels and deals— but The Movies themselves.

The Bad Girl (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)We take the occasion of the publication of Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel, The Bad Girl, to air this previously unheard interview in which the great Peruvian novelist describes the effects of "El Boom" –- magic realism and its relatives -- on the literature of Latin America...

Bowl of Cherries (McSweeney's) Millard Kaufman has written a classic comic novel that belongs in the tradition that runs from Charles Dickens to Evelyn Waugh.

Joe is Ron Padgett's intimate and affectionate biography-memoir of his friend of four decades, artist-poet Joe Brainard.

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (Norton) Biblical scholar Robert Alter faces a barrage of questions: What are psalms? Who wrote them? If they are prayers, why does he consider them poems?

This wide-ranging yet intimate conversation with Junot Díaz explores many difficult subjects...

twin time: or how death befell me (Semiotext(e)) The heroine of twin time is a woman whose life is surrounded by mystery. Who is her father? Where is her mother? Why did no one tell her she has a twin brother?

Death of a Murderer (Knopf) A factual series of murders provides the background for this novel: the Moor Murders that haunted the British imagination in the 1960's.