Bookworm

American Woman (Harper Collins) The critics loved Susan Choi's novelization of the Patty Hearst saga, but they barely mention the book's center, told from the point of view of the Asian-American woman who helped hide Hearst and her kidnapper comrades...

The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin) Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story writer Jhumpa Lahiri defines her beliefs about writing: directness, simplicity, reality and emotional truth are her guideposts. How appropriate then that India-born Gogol, the hero of this new novel, should want to change his name....

Edmund White turns himself into Mrs. Trollope, the Victorian traveler who, in her last year, narrates a biography of her scandalous friend, the feminist Fanny Wright....

Vernon God Little (Canongate) DBC Pierre (the dark horse underdog who surprised the literary world by winning the 2003 Booker Prize) divulges the hidden workings of his rebellious Columbine-inspired novel: His narrator, a disguised St. Peter, retells Christ's story, using a uniquely profane American vernacular.

This interview, originally broadcast on March 5, 1998, will not be heard on KCRW so that we may present special holiday programming.

Over the course of his career, Edward Said produced compact and thrilling works that revolutionized the field of literary criticism. In his memory, Bookworm offers a conversation, first broadcast in 2002, in which Said talks about literature, critical theory, and exile.

Train (Doubleday)

The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday)

Where the Stress Falls (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)Where does the stress fall in the life of a writer-intellectual? Susan Sontag examines the difference between exploring the interior of a subject and exploring the interior of the explorer...