Bookworm

J. D. McClatchy has traveled the US visiting the homes of classic American writers. Joan Didion talks about her native California; Jonathan Lethem describes growing up in Brooklyn; and Toni Morrison describes the creation of an imaginary home, a hotel, in her most-recent novel. 

We hear from E. L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer, but the focus is on Russell Banks, a white, male, American writer, who started his career in a specific part of the world, the American Northeast. He has explored identity throughout his career, using it as a narrative tool. He believes that good writing transcends the mythology of identity....

Russell Banks, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Camille Paglia, Stephen Greenblatt, Tom Wolfe and David Mitchell In the first of this 10-part series, Escaping the Cage: Identity, Multiculturalism and Writing, we sample the range of attitudes toward identity, identity politics and multiculturalism. Among the highlights: Angelou describes an emotional encounter with Tupac Shakur, Sontag rejects self-expression as a writing goal, and Paglia embraces multiculturalism while scolding academics for losing literature in a welter of special interests...

American Linden (Tupelo) Your Time Has Come (Verse) Poets Matthew Zapruder and Joshua Beckman discuss the formation of a new literary press, Wave, and then branch out into an exploration of the improbable economics of life as a poet....

The young Jonathan Safran Foer (28) offers an even younger narrator (9) whose father died in the bombing of the World Trade Center.

Jubilant Thicket: new and selected poems (Copper Canyon) Jonathan Williams alternates between playing the role of elder statesman and that of rambunctious old cuss. You can hear it in his poetry...

Saturday (Doubleday) Ian McEwan's first book since his stunning Atonement, is one of the first novels written in response to 9/11 and worldwide threats of terrorism. It explores of the forces of order and chaos that shape contemporary society....

K. (Knopf) Roberto Calasso--scholar, publisher, polymath--delves into the works of Franz Kafka more deeply than anyone ever has. In this conversation, we explore the demonic and metaphysical elements of Kafka's world. Calasso describes one of the happier interludes in Kafka's life, in the process adding new dimensions to the word -Kafka-esque.-

In Lunar Follies (Coffee House), one of his genre-defying extravaganzas, Gilbert Sorrentino describes outlandish art shows, all of them taking place in galleries named for mountain ranges and craters of the moon...

We explore the hallucinatory intensity of Steve Erickson's visionary novel born out of the anxiety provoked by the imagined loss of a child....