Bookworm

Headless (Little House on the Bowery/Akashic Books) Dennis Cooper is editing a new-fiction series for Akashic Books. Benjamin Weissman's Headless is one of the first of the new releases. Together, writer and editor discuss the poles of Weissman's work...

Doris Lessing, one of our most sage and canny living writers discusses the real stories behind her fiction....

American Smooth (Norton) When her house burned down, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove decided to learn formal ballroom dancing...

Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan) An exploration of Upper Paleolithic cave painting leads poet Clayton Eshleman to this meditation about hell and rebirth. This book, in poetry, prose and picture, marks the culmination of a thirty-year investigation of Pre-history.

Although camouflaged as a social history, James McCourt's "Queer Street" is a memoir of sexual initiation and awareness...

The Fifth Book of Peace (Knopf) A fire at home destroys her manuscript and reminds Maxine Hong Kingston of the firebombing of Vietnam. She extends the analogy of private loss and public tragedy to arrive at a novel whose purpose is to promote personal serenity and global peace.

I Sailed with Magellan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Dream and reality are side by side in Stuart Dybek's short stories--but with a twist. As the sexual dreams of his adolescent characters are shaped by reality, those characters are transformed...

Old School (Knopf)This conversation illustrates the care Tobias Wolff takes with narrative revelation: every step reveals character, each twist and turn provides a clue to the nature of the mysteriously disagreeable man who narrates this first novel by master storyteller Wolff.

Love (Knopf)Nobel laureate Toni Morrison shows how the careful arrangement of specific detail in her newest fiction, Love, forces the reader to participate in its structure.

Mr. Paradise (Morrow) Raffish characters, extreme events and lewd jokes are signatures of the widely praised Elmore Leonard style....