Bookworm

The Fall of Heartless Horse by Martha Kinney (Akashic); Grab Bag by Derek McCormack (Akashic) Two young writers and their editor tell about their new books for a new publishing house: McKinney, in the style of a Scottish border ballad, chronicles the fall of a suburban family, while McCormack employs wicked understatement to celebrate a depraved childhood...

Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (Pantheon) Firebrand Paglia devotes her energies to a vibrant demonstration of how to read poetry, attacking the theorists who've made understanding a poem preposterously complex, and passionately defending the poems she's chosen that represent poetry at its greatest....

Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)In the second part of our conversation, we explore the historical and social forces that shape Marilynne Robinson's narrator, John Ames, and, by extension, the Protestant Church...

Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)The loveliness of life, life itself as a blessing, is the subject of Marilynne Robinson's beautiful book. In this first of a two-part conversation, we discuss her narrator, a preacher, and his troubled relations with the world and the people around him.

A wizard of a storyteller, Greenblatt combines prodigious historical research and encyclopedic knowledge to conjure a vision of life and love in Elizabethan England.

Heir to the Glimmering World (Houghton Mifflin)Eccentric and beautiful, Cynthia Ozick's novel is about an immigrant family's attempts to preserve a dying esoteric tradition....

The Pacific and Other Stories (Penguin) Mark Helprin's critics--who mainly regard him as a political conservative and, therefore, a traitor to imaginative literature--have made him into a martyr. Here, he fends off the slings and arrows to say what he believes a writer to be, and describes the values he wants his work to embrace.

Joy Williams, specialist in what should be called sorrowful hilarity, reads from her work Honored Guest. Pretty soon we discover that what we would call a sacrificial victim, she calls an honored guest...

How We Are Hungry: Stories (McSweeney-s) Dave Eggers begins by describing his book as an object (it-s designed to look like a Moleskine Journal). From there, we jump to the idea of stories as entries, improvs, breaking the rules as they go. Then, of course, we go on to influences Monty Python, Donald Barthelme, and, and, and...

The Volcano LoverNovelist, essayist and driving intellectual force, Susan Sontag, died late last year. In her memory, we offer this conversation, first broadcast in October 1992. On this first visit to Bookworm, she spoke with great enthusiasm about her novel, The Volcano Lover and how she came to write -- of all things -- a romance.