Bookworm

From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Coach House) When the emerging avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin published his journals, the connection between his life and his wacky operatic visionary movies was bound to come out....

With solemnity, grace and a little defensiveness, this Grand Old Man of Letters reads, discusses and defends his choices...

Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (Random House) She's at it again! This time, Alice Walker takes to the rain forest for the most-recent leg of her spiritual journey. We meet shamans, visit Hawaiian grief circles, and learn the secrets of ethno-botany...

Trouble in Mind: Poems (Knopf) The ecstatic and ghoulish poetry of Lucie Brock-Broido is stitched together from fragments of poetic history. In this case, she writes a whole suite of poems from titles that Wallace Stevens listed in a notebook but never used. How does she arrive at her very original voice when quotation and appropriation are her constant strategies?

The hero of The Confessions of Max Tivoli  is born an old man who ages backwards -- not an unusual fantasy premise.

Melissa Pritchard's Late Bloomer is funny. She's taken her ongoing interest in creativity and transformation, and placed it in counterpoint to a lively parody of New Age spirituality. New questions arise...

The Dew Breaker (Knopf) What happens when a Haitian "dew breaker" (torturer) moves to America and conceals his identity? In this collection of interrelated stories, Edwidge Danticat explores the twin legacies of torture and secrecy...

GraceLand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) In Chris Abani's GraceLand, a teenage Elvis-impersonator in Lagos, Nigeria lives in poverty as he pursues an American pop-culture dream of success....

The Face (Harper Collins) Rapid tonal shifts, teetering rhetorical mixtures of irony and self-pity, and overwhelming instability characterize David St. John's The Face, a novella in verse...

Kindred (Beacon) Although Octavia Butler was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (-genius- grant-) in 1995 because of her science fiction, she does not consider her breakthrough novel, Kindred, to be sci-fi. Indeed, Butler celebrates the 25th anniversary of that book with a review of the many paradoxes that surround her work: contradictions and reversals that have placed her among the distinguished literary novelists of our time.