Bookworm

Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) A a single, perfectly placed phrase brings an essay about the death of August Kleinzahler's brother to a heart-breaking, unforgettable conclusion...

The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury) Allan Hollinghurst-s Booker Prize-winning novel pits the aesthetic sensibility against the deprivations of Margaret Thatcher-s London-here seen as the protagonist-s largely frustrated war against ingrained social gay-bashing.

The more closely you investigate Russell Banks' powerful new novel, The Darling, the stranger it becomes. Set in Liberia, it explores its heroine's narcissistic wound....

Snow (Knopf) Turkey's preeminent novelist, Orhan Pamuk, has decided to write a political novel-without a political agenda. The result resembles -- but not quite -- the great metaphysical novels he's written previously...

The Stone Fields (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Courtney Angela Brkic recruited her forensic skills to help exhume and identity bodies from besieged villages in Bosnia. She is American born, of Serbo-Croatian lineage. This conversation, then, is about the pain of ancestral memory and the consequences of direct contact with the dead.

Birds without Wings (Knopf) In a conversation about the birth of the conflicts that beset us, Louis de Bernières (Corelli's Mandolin) talks about a Turkish village where difference is so ordinary that a Muslim religious leader can ask a Catholic priest for advice...

Tijuana Straits (Scribner) The inventor of "surf-noir," Kem Nunn, describes how the evil of the world offers an opportunity for a writer of thrillers to structure a tale of redemption.

Country of Origin (Norton) Multi-racial ethnicity underlies the mystery in this literary thriller by Korean-American writer Don Lee, who spent much of his childhood first in Japan and then in Korea....

The Shadow of the Wind (Penguin)Spaniard Carlos Ruiz Zafón discusses the way he utilizes "modern narrative technologies" to re-tool the traditional novel and create a work filled with history, terror and love--but also with uncertainty, deconstruction and despair.

The greatest living writer of prose in English explores his deepest influence: Rainer Maria Rilke. In this conversation, we witness the interpretation of two modern masters.