KCRW's Bookworm
A must for the serious reader, "Bookworm" showcases writers of fiction and poetry - the established, new or emerging - all interviewed with insight and precision by the show's host and guiding spirit, Michael Silverblatt.
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James Galvin
As Is (Copper Canyon)One of our most tender poets (tough but tender), James Galvin, investigates his growing tendency toward poems that express his bitterness? toward politics, environmental despoilment, big business. Still he affirms, in poems that breathe with sweet relief, the ongoing possi …
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Nicholson Baker
The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster)The polymath Nicholson Baker has been able to create a version of himself in the figure of accomplished poet Paul Chowder...
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Nick Laird
Glover's Mistake (Viking) In this novel of love, manipulation and deception, Nick Laird attempts one of the trickiest strategies in the novelist's tool kit. He structures a book so that readers come to understand things the characters remain blind to.
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Lorrie Moore
A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf) Lorrie Moore has written three collections of short stories and two rather short novels. Now, after eleven years of work, she has published a longer novel and survived to tell the tale...
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Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Angel's Game (Doubleday)Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón has attracted an international audience with his series of metaphysical thrillers.
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Dennis Cooper
Ugly Man (Harper Collins) Although we've followed the career of Dennis Copper from the ground up, in this conversation, he acknowledges a new influence?the master director of French film comedy, Jacques Tati.
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Alvaro Uribe and Cristina Rivera-Garza
Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Dalkey Archive) This new anthology makes clear that magical realism is only a tiny segment of what?s been happening in Mexican fiction over the last half-century. In this conversation with its editor, Álvaro Uribe, and Cristina Rivera-Garza, one of the wri …
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Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman
Road Show, a recording of the musical (Nonesuch, PS Classics) Stephen Sondheim is right ? his new musical, Roadshow, is not gloomy. Sondheim and his collaborator, playwright John Weidman, discuss the many revisions of the musical that has evolved in an extraordinary way, and may yet become an Ameri …
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Clancy Martin
How to Sell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Clancy Martin's first novel reads like a piece of sleaze, but it turns out ? surprise! ? to be a philosophical novel about the problems of appearance and reality...
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Colum McCann
Let the Great World Spin (Random House) Darkened by intimations of 9/11, Column McCann's generous extravaganza of a novel brings together the lives of strangers who witness a high-wire artist dancing between the two World Trade Center towers...
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Reif Larsen
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Penguin Press) Reif Larsen's T. S. Spivet, twelve-year-old genius cartographer, compulsively maps everything...
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Glen David Gold
Sunnyside (Knopf)What a charming raconteur Glen David Gold is, with his anecdotes about the movies, theories about identity and celebrity, and knowledge of World War I...
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Eduardo Galeano
Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books)Eduardo Galeano has written a history of the world in brief chapters, each one devoted to an iconic incident...
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E. L. Doctorow
Homer & Langley (Random House) In this comic and affecting novel based on the lives of the Collyer brothers ? one a blind pianist, the other a hoarder and inventor ? Doctorow creates an ironic allegory of modern America.
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Anne Waldman
Manatee /Humanity (Penguin Poets) Anne Waldman guides us through this book-length poetry-and-prose meditation on endangered species by describing an initiation ceremony designed to instill a deeper sense of compassion....
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John Wray
Lowboy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) John Wray's novel about a schizophrenic boy's quest for sex and/or love flirts violently with the thriller form...
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Wells Tower
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Wells Tower is the most talked-about new story writer to emerge on the literary scene. This conversation focuses on the weird details he uses to illuminate a mostly conventional narrative arc...
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Matthea Harvey
Modern Life (Graywolf Press) Like dangerous toys or perilous amusement park rides, Matthea Harvey's poems careen into the unknown...
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Brad Gooch
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown)While we take a mini-tour of Flannery O'Connor's life and writing, biographer Brad Gooch describes his difficulties in gaining access to the author's inner life.
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Matthew Dickman
All-American Poem (American Poetry Review)Kate Tufts Discovery Award-winner Matthew Dickman writes emotional and accessible poetry...
KCRW's Bookworm
