Bookworm

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf) Two novel-lovers share their deep passions for reading. Jane loves the realists; Michael the Bookworm loves the inventors. But more than anything, they love "a lengthy written narrative with a protagonist" the novel.

Pax Atomica: poems (Ecco) Campbell McGrath has figured out how to perform a wonderful trick: he writes ecstatic comic poetry about the decline of America...

Trance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Christopher Sorrentino takes the Patty Hearst saga as the springboard for an exploration of the mass hypnosis of American culture. This novel about inter-generational warfare is written by the son of formidable avante-gardiste Gilbert Sorrentino.

Joyce Carol Oates says this novel was written as a tribute to her mother, who died last year. Clearer, simpler, less literary than Oates' other books, it was meant to be a novel her mother would have enjoyed....

The author of The Very Persistent Gappers of Fripp decided he'd try to write another satire-fantasy.

The Master (Scribner) The winner of this year's Los Angeles Times award for fiction reveals the difficulties of writing about the life of Henry James...

Them: A Memoir of Parents (The Penguin Press) After an affair with the great Russian poet Mayakovsky, Francine du Plessix Gray's mother married a man who became a kingpin in the Cond- Nast fashion magazine empire. All the high fashion and social elite of New York are discussed, but they pale beside the evocation of true genius. Mayakovsky and poetry triumph over commerce.

Louise Erdrich's beautiful short novel emerged over a period of ten years, after an older story suddenly suggested deeper meanings...

Kazuo Ishiguro never tells more than he has to -- his stripped-down narratives are filled with absence and mystery. 

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (Believer Books) The controversial French writer on his early influence, H. P. Lovecraft, the American writer of classic horror fantasies. Houellebecq discusses their shared, essentially anti-human stance and then quietly, poignantly reveals his own pessimistic philosophy.