Bookworm

The Return of the Player (Grove) In this conversation, the subject of the immorality of Hollywood gives way to the subject of the immorality of wealth, which in turn, surprisingly, gives way to the question of whether the soul exists. If the soul does not exist, is there any immorality? Do fictional characters have souls? Gradually we uncover the moral equations underlying Tolkin's universe.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics: A Novel (Viking) While Marisha Pessl's first novel has a bright and witty narrative voice, it has mysterious depths and a hidden Nabokovian counterstructure. We explore the author's ambitions and her decision to keep the book's secrets well-hidden.

Grief (Hyperion) Andrew Holleran has written a beautiful, somber novella about loss. His narrator has come to Washington, D.C. to teach a course about AIDS literature. He is grieving the death of his mother and finds solace in the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln....  

Chris Kraus takes her aim at the traditional bourgeois novel about marriage and family and delivers a book full of bullet-holes... What is left standing?

Only Revolutions (Pantheon) There’s no mistaking a novel by Mark Danielewski for any other. This new one can be read forward, backward and upside down. It has multi-colored inks; two sewn-in bookmarks (green and gold); and a circular structure. Here, we explore how the book’s design reflects the joy-ride/killing spree of its two perpetual teenagers as they careen through time and space.

You Must Set Forth at Dawn (Random House) Nobel Prize-winning African playwright Wole Soyinka explores the myths of exile and return that underlie his most recent memoir. He contrasts European and African cosmologies, and describes his passionate activism as a quest influence by the gods.

Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels (Everyman's Library) A New York Times poll indicated that John Updike's quartet of Rabbit novels is one of the five most important achievements in fiction in the past quarter century.

Terrorist (Knopf) The subject of John Updike's recent bestseller required that he contrast his own reliance on faith with the more violent faith of a young Islamic terrorist. This first of a two-part conversation explores the dark side of empathy and identification.

Frances Johnson (Clear Cut Press) Using the model of the "nurse romances" of the 1950's, Stacey Levine has concocted a small-town romance--with a difference. The undercurrents of sexuality, repression and gender uncertainty rise to create flood tides. We discuss the nightmarish emissions from the unconscious that rock this seemingly placid novel.

Present Company (Copper Canyon); Summer Doorways (Shoemaker and Hoard) For his first visit to Bookworm, the eminent American poet, W. S. Merwin, explores the sequence of odes in which he addresses everything from inanimate objects to his own soul...