Bookworm

Oates's most autobiographical novel and the culmination of her career-long themes and obsessions.

A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer (Harcourt) Prose impressionist Christine Schutt describes the painstaking intensity that allows her to perfect her cadences and the precision of her imagery. Her stories are built up draft upon draft, variation upon variation, until Schutt achieves a density that is both poetic and conclusive.

Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville has written the first in a series of thrillers, and he's even taken on an alias or, at least, a nom de plume.

A Worldly Country (Ecco) In this landmark conversation, John Ashbery talks about his fascination with nonsense and fantasy, beginning with Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Those books involve incomprehension, parody and an extreme use of non sequitur--qualities that for Ashbery define the way we live now.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press) The design and composition of this five hundred page picture book took Brian Selznick many years' work. Here, we talk about the influence of movies, especially French movies, especially the work of pioneer Georges Méliès. The talk about Méliès leads us to the spiritual mentors that haunt Selznick's vivid imagination.

Devotion (Houghton Mifflin) Betrayal and forgiveness are subjects here. Howard Norman's signature melancholy pervades this exploration of romance, and he shows us how even people who are perfect for one another have a need to betray and forgive--but not forget, never forget.

Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)C.K. Williams' Collected Poems covers a lifetime's concern with ethics and personal morality. As his work proceeds, he develops a quality of consciousness and empathy that some would describe as a soul. In this conversation, this accessible and plainspoken poet plumbs the depths, as we trace his concerns from poem to poem.

Sacred Games (Harper Collins)Gangsters, detectives, Bollywood movie stars--Chandra mobilizes the machinery of a thriller in order to reveal Bombay at its most various. Fascinating then, to hear him describe his novel as a mandala of perceptions in which characters reflect the worlds they move through, the plot enacting the clash between different beliefs about reality.

The Castle in the Forest (Random House) In the second of this two-part conversation about the bureaucratic, dim-witted culture that characterized the German provinces of Hitler's childhood, Mailer reveals that his narrator, an assistant to the devil, is himself a bureaucrat. Bureaucracy becomes the model for the world of this novel, down to the smallest detail—the beehives kept by Hitler's father. Mailer waxes hilarious about the sexual behavior of bees.

The Castle in the Forest (Random House) Now in his eighties, Norman Mailer has forsaken the violence and declarative sentences of his signature style for the gradual somber analytics of a style like that of Thomas Mann. In this first of a two-part interview, we discuss this unexpected change and his new novel's subject: the childhood of Adolf Hitler.