Bookworm

Beasts of No Nation (Harper Collins) Forcing himself to inhabit the terrifying heart of amorality and violence, Uzodinma Iweala has created the first-person voice of a child-soldier.

Big Fat Little Lit (Puffin)Back by popular demand! Editors Spiegelman and Mouly talk about how they recruited and supervised the many artists and writers who created these "comics for kids..."

The Eagle's Throne Carlos Fuentes casts a satiric eye on Mexican politics and, by extension, on global politics, skewering the art of politics in its entirety...

When you've written as many stories as Joyce Carol Oates, the process of choosing just sixty of them for an omnibus is daunting. Here, Oates explores those choices...

Talk Talk (Viking)When T. C. Boyle sits down to write a thriller, none of the usual rules apply. He starts with a young deaf woman, a computer animator and an identity thief and creates a novel about communication. We explore some of the buried connections that take him beyond the thriller form into an exploration of the things that keep human identity intact.

Black Swan Green (Random House) David Mitchell, one of the younger generation of British writers, provides a jolt of energy to the coming-of-age novel. First off, this novel ends just when the rite-of-passage traditionally begins...

Collected Poems: 1954-2004 (Schocken) During our conversation, Irving Feldman talks about everything from religion to cannibalism, from poetic diction to the structure of families. This intense discussion explores the poet's imagination and convictions, while revealing his passionate intellect.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Alice Quinn, the poetry editor of the New Yorker, assembled this volume of drafts and fragments from Elizabeth Bishop's notebooks and archives. The result is an extraordinary free association about Bishop: her childhood, her sexuality, her influences...

Paradiso Diaspora (Penguin)In a searching inquiry into the language of poetry, John Yau talks about avoiding autobiography while creating poetry that reflects his Chinese-American background--the influence of what he calls "Ing Grish." We explore the evolution of a dream language that is, in itself, an aesthetic of diaspora.

Book of Longing (Ecco) Leonard Cohen talks about his early years as a poet in Montreal; his novel, Beautiful Losers; his songs; and now, ten years since his last book and fifty years since his first, the vicissitudes and recoveries that led to the art, lyrics and poems in his new Book of Longing.