Bookworm

You Are Not a Stranger Here (Doubleday) Viewed together, the short stories in Adam Haslett's bravura first collection present a fugue of obsessions and concerns: mental illness, surrogate parents, suppressed or uncontrollable desires, and the search for a way to order experience....

Nobody's Perfect (Knopf) We pursue the New Yorker's critic through the dark woods of his literary and cinematic interests, finally emerging into a clearing as Anthony Lane reveals his longstanding love for the world of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, Mr. Mulliner and Blandings Castle...

Niagara (Serpent?s Tail) The Amazon dominatrix of Warhol-superstardom has become an impressive novelist, specializing in primal Noir fiction. Her feminist archetypes, her dangerous sexualized landscapes, her fantasies of revenge and retribution all reveal the strategies of an artist who transforms rage into visions of liberation.

Having returned to his native Brooklyn after a more than 20 years in California, Gilbert Sorrentino's new books span the continent with an unrelenting experimental style...

Ben Marcus, a younger member of the avant-garde, talks about some of the devices that have structured his books...

Novelist James McCaourt constructs the complicated personality of a movie goddess in retreat.

My Loose Thread (Canongate Books)In his most vulnerable and emotionally accessible novel, Dennis Cooper explores the mind of a boy who is like one of the Columbine killers. He talks about the world the boy imagines-and our compassion enlarges as the boy-s consciousness shuts down.

Rick Moody explores his dark ancestry, which includes the Puritan minister who inspired a famous Hawthorne story...

Francine Prose's The Lives of the Muses is a series of "brief lives" of women who inspired famous men: Alice of Alice in Wonderland, Yoko Ono, Mrs. Salvador Dali, the pre-Raphaelites...

McSweeney-s Books Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) has invested in his beliefs and started up a press. He publishes the popular -lit-mag- McSweeney-s and a whole line of books by authors he admires. We explore and evaluate this unusual inventory.