KCRW's Bookworm Podcasts

PodcastDirectory / Variety / Public Radio
PodcastDirectory / Regions / NA / USA

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. Primary Format : Public Radio Also Listed as: Fiction Literature NPR Public Radio City : Santa Monica State/Province : CA Country : USA Country : NA User Tags: bookworm monk User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: Poetry | View this Podcast on a Google Map. Add to iTunes Text Only listing of KCRW's Bookworm Podcasts Trumix.com listings available of KCRW's Bookworm Podcasts Click Here to Update the directory of this podcasts programs.

Trumix.com listings available of KCRW's Bookworm Podcasts Build your own playlists with this podcast. Jim Krusoe Girl Factory(Tin House)InJim Krusoe's strange and funny new novel, six women are being preserved in acidophilus in the basement of a frozen yogurt shop. The innocent hero's attempts to save these kidnapped beauties are disastrous. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Peter Carey His Illegal Self(Knopf)The excitement ofPeter Carey's new novel is rendered through aspecific stylistic choice: He integrates two wildly different voicesinto the sentences, creating a vibrant stereo-effect. The result isamazing--the novel's action seems to be taking place about six inchesfrom your face. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ariana Reines Coeur de Lion(Mal-o-mar);The Cow(Fence Books)This astonishing young poet—still in her twenties—is surely destined to be one of the crucial voices of her generation. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Colm Toibin Mothers and Sons: Stories (Scribner) Colm T--ib--n candidly describes the inspirations for the stories in his first collection. Sometimes a landscape is enough to trigger a story, sometimes an anecdote or a bit of family lore. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Colm Toibin Mothers and Sons: Stories(Scribner)Colm Tóibíncandidly describes the inspirations for the stories in his first collection. Sometimes a landscape is enough to trigger a story, sometimes an anecdote or a bit of family lore. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Anne Enright The Gathering (Grove) In Anne Enright's Booker Prize-winning novel about a family wake, the narrator remembers, lies, invents and imagines with equal ardor. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Anne Enright The Gathering(Grove)InAnne Enright's Booker Prize-winning novel about a family wake, the narrator remembers, lies, invents and imagines with equal ardor. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Arnon Grunberg The Jewish Messiah (Penguin) Unsettling, profane and goofy, Arnon Grunberg---s novel takes politically incorrect risks with contemporary Jewish culture. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Arnon Grunberg The Jewish Messiah(Penguin)Unsettling, profane and goofy,Arnon Grunberg’s novel takes politically incorrect risks with contemporary Jewish culture. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website William T. Vollman Riding Toward Everywhere (Ecco)William Vollman decided to spend as much time as possible viewing the stars from the flatbed of a moving train. He---s a ---fauxbo--- not a hobo, and he movingly describes his need to find freedom by hopping a train---without any destination in mind. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website William T. Vollman Riding Toward Everywhere(Ecco)William Vollmandecided to spend as much time as possible viewing the stars from the flatbed of a moving train. He’s a “fauxbo” not a hobo, and he movingly describes his need to find freedom by hopping a train–without any destination in mind. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Rieff Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir (Simon & Schuster)David Rieff accompanied his mother, Susan Sontag, through the medical ordeals that led to her death. We explore the death of this great writer, a woman who resisted consolation and maintained---to her last days---an enormous appetite for life. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Rieff Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir(Simon& Schuster)David Rieffaccompanied his mother, Susan Sontag, through the medical ordeals that led to her death. We explore the death of this great writer, a woman who resisted consolation and maintained—to her last days—an enormous appetite for life. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Geraldine Brooks People of the Book (Viking)The art of detection unravels the secrets of the Sarajevo Haggadah. What does the miraculous survival of this medieval codex tell us about the survival of both culture and history. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Geraldine Brooks People of the Book(Viking)The art of detection unravels the secrets of the Sarajevo Haggadah. What does the miraculous survival of this medieval codex tell us about the survival of both culture and history? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lewis Hyde The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (Vintage)How does the creative person function in a market culture. In the 25 years since The Gift was first published, this question has become increasingly more difficult to answer. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lewis Hyde The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World(Vintage)How does the creative person function in a market culture? In the 25 years sinceThe Giftwas first published, this question has become increasingly more difficult to answer. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson Sorry, Tree (Wave Books) and Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press) and Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press) Critic David Lehman has called the New York School of Poetry "the Last Avant Garde." Poet and critic Maggie Nelson suggests it might better be considered "one of the first gay avant gardes," since its original members included Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and James Schuyler. We examine the role of women in the New York School: Ba ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Robert Hass Time and Materials: Poems 1997---2005 (Ecco) If it can still be said that a poet can have a humanizing influence on his culture, Robert Hass is such a poet. Here, as we discuss the poems in his National Book Award-winning collection, the beautiful, moving humanity of Hass' voice emerges, making us wish we were better people. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cees Nooteboom Lost Paradise (Grove) In this duel of interpretations, Dutch writer Nooteboom (who has been repeatedly shortlisted for the Nobel Prize) shows the whipper-snapper Michael Silverblatt that there are simpler, clearer, realer reasons for the angels in Lost Paradise than the over-interpreting Silverblatt wants to believe. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Oliver Sacks Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf) Oliver Sacks explores the brain's affinity for music by examining the extraordinary ways our brains adapt in response to musical aberrations. Sack's wisdom and deep love of music are palpable in this vibrant conversation. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Russell Banks The Reserve (Harper)Russell Banks, one of the great living American novelists, uses the 1930's novel of passion and betrayal -- with its allied seductions, madness, and adultery -- to explore America's class system; the relationships between art, politics and wealth; and the despoiling of the American Landscape. (An abridged version of this interview will be heard live on KCRW due to our semi-annual subscription drive. It will be archived in its entirety online.) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Edmund White Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel (Ecco)Here's a literary historical enigma: Did Stephen Crane attempt to write a gay companion piece to his Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Literary rumor says he tried. At any rate, now Edmund White has written it for him. It's Edmund White on Hotel de Dream and the "underground" history of classic American fiction. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website James McCourt Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey (Turtle Point)This big, hilarious and joyful book has been twenty-five years in the making. The best description of it came from Fran Lebowitz who called it "The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization set to music." James McCourt describes this first volume (of three) of his masterpiece-in-progress. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Plante ABC (Pantheon) In this novel, a series of unlinked personal, familial and global catastrophes leads unrelated victims to search for order. Mysteriously, the "order" they discover is alphabetical order. So many cultures begin their alphabets with ABC. Why. What revelation is concealed in the alphabet's code. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ann Patchett Run (Harper Collins)The family in Ann Patchett's Run unites rich with poor, black with white. The novel is a thriller---but the mystery at its heart is the mystery of spiritual grace. Has this vision been shaped by Patchett's own personal history. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website George Saunders The Braindead Megaphone (Riverhead)This conversation provides a mini-course in short-story writing, Saunders-style and explores the construction of short fiction from the ground up. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Carol Muske-Dukes Channeling Mark Twain (Random House)This novel revives the belief that poetry has a close connection to personal and political liberation. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Steve Erickson Zeroville (Europa Editions)This breakthrough novel is about the The Movies---not the movie business, not the wheels and deals---but The Movies themselves. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mario Vargas Llosa The Bad Girl (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)We take the occasion of the publication of Vargas Llosa's new novel, The Bad Girl, to air this previously unheard interview in which the great Peruvian novelist describes the effects of "El Boom" ---- magic realism and its relatives -- on the literature of Latin America. (This interview will not air live on KCRW as it will be pre-empted by special programming.) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Millard Kaufman Bowl of Cherries (McSweeney's) Millard Kaufman has written a classic comic novel that belongs in the tradition that runs from Charles Dickens to Evelyn Waugh. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ron Padgett Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Coffee House) Joe is Ron Padgett's intimate and affectionate biography-memoir of his friend of four decades, artist-poet Joe Brainard.Note: This interview will not air on KCRW as it will be pre-empted by special holiday programming. It will, however, be available online. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Robert Alter The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (Norton) Biblical scholar Robert Alter faces a barrage of questions: What are psalms. Who wrote them. If they are prayers, why does he consider them poems. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) This wide-ranging yet intimate conversation explores many difficult subjects: sex addiction, cultural difference, the Dominican diaspora, dictatorship, new ways of thinking about the function of literature, and the necessity that we leave the isolation of our self-made cocoons. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Veronica Gonzalez twin time: or how death befell me (Semiotext(e)) The heroine of twin time is a woman whose life is surrounded by mystery. Who is her father. Where is her mother. Why did no one tell her she has a twin brother. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rupert Thomson Death of a Murderer (Knopf) A factual series of murders provides the background for this novel: the Moor Murders that haunted the British imagination in the 1960's. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alice Sebold The Almost Moon (Little, Brown) Alice Sebold wrote The Lovely Bones, one of the most beloved and lovable books in recent years. How did she prepare herself for the onslaught she'll face with The Almost Moon, a book which, for all its quality, is resolutely in the realm of unlovability. Alice Sebold, on the writer's obligation to surprise, to grow and to change. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ana Castillo The Guardians (Random House) This is a novel about borders in which borders disappear: the border between old and young, between secular and sacred, between states---but not the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website William Gibson Spook Country (Putnam)Along with the most sophisticated future-predictions, speculations about the sociology of cities, and adventures in virtual post-realities, William Gibson has finally learned how to get his characters from one room to another. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Viken Berberian Das Kapital: A Novel of Love and Money Markets (Simon & Schuster)Viken Berberian writes in a post-modern apocalyptic vein about billionaire stock traders, terrorists and nationalists. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Marianne Wiggins The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster) With its fascinating combination of history, biography, memoir and essay, is The Shadow Catcher a novel. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Miranda July No one belongs here more than you and Learning to Love You More, co-author Harrell Fletcher (Prestel) Miranda July's film Me and You and Everyone We Know captured the mood of a generation ---- and its attention. In this first book of stories, we find the same fear of paralysis, the same narcotized, sleepwalker affect. Why does Miranda July, a tireless whirlwind, identify with these listless characters. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nathan Englander The Ministry of Special Cases (Knopf)Nathan Englander uses desapareacidos to stand for all kinds of disappearance. Here, we focus on yet another: his own. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Naeem Murr The Perfect Man (Random House)Naeem Murr's work has been described as perverse---but he insists that this perversity seems ordinary to him. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Michael Ondaatje Divisadero (Knopf) Michael Ondaatje's novels come together through a combination of obsession and intuition. He works in the dark, not knowing where he is heading, juxtaposing disparate materials, noticing echoes and recurrences. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Helena Maria Viramontes Their Dogs Came with Them (Atria) Helena Maria Viramontes has written about L.A.-based Latino culture before -- but who could have expected this epic work about a neighborhood that is divided by a freeway, cut off and lost in Los Angeles. Viramontes explores the explosive insights that gave her the ability to grow as a novelist. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kurt Vonnegut Support KCRW's Summer SignUp: (http://www.kcrw.com) A Man without a Country (7 Stories)The late Kurt Vonnegut has been astonishing us sincethe 1960's.-- Here, in the rebroadcast of a 2006 interview, he speaks as a socialist disappointed by human behavior, our country and our times. He "wants to go home. (This interview will be not be heard on KCRW as it will be pre-empted by our semi-annual subscription drive.) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Richard Flanagan The Unknown Terrorist (Grove) Richard Flanagan felt that his last novel, Gould's Book of Fish, widely acclaimed a masterpiece, had burnt him out. Here, he discusses the things he did to reenergize. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Jim Crace The Pesthouse (Doubleday) Jim Crace makes lies masquerade as truth in this post-apocalyptic tale of toxified America. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Jonathan Lethem You Don't Love Me Yet (Doubleday) The pleasures of the lightweight and the free-spirited. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss (Grove) Booker Prize-winner Kiran Desai says she prefers "messiness" to perfection--it's more human, and it fits her subject better. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mark Slouka The Visible World (Houghton Mifflin) Can a novelist uncover a secret. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website John Ashbery and Ron Padgett on the works of Pierre Reverdy Haunted House (Ashbery; Black Square Editions); Prose Poems (Padgett; Black Square Editions) The haunted, lonely prose-poetry of Pierre Reverdy has attracted many translators. Here, two of America's most extraordinary poets read and discuss their translations, prose-poetry in general, and the peculiar, eerie poetry of the great Reverdy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lydia Davis Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Lydia Davis writes elegant prose pieces in which basic confusions are described with authority and clarity. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Joanna Scott Everybody Loves Somebody (Back Bay Books)Joanna Scott claims her collection of stories is a history of love, from World War I to the present. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Norman Mailer, Part II The Castle in the Forest (Random House)In this conversation about the bureaucratic, dim-witted culture that characterized the German provinces of Hitler's childhood, Mailer reveals that his narrator, an assistant to the devil, is himself a bureaucrat. Bureaucracy becomes the model for the world of this novel, down to the smallest detail---the beehives kept by Hitler's father. Mailer waxes hilarious about the sexual behavior of bees. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Norman Mailer, Part II The Castle in the Forest (Random House)In this conversation about the bureaucratic, dim-witted culture that characterized the German provinces of Hitler's childhood, Mailer reveals that his narrator, an assistant to the devil, is himself a bureaucrat. Bureaucracy becomes the model for the world of this novel, down to the smallest detail---the beehives kept by Hitler's father. Mailer waxes hilarious about the sexual behavior of bees. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Norman Mailer, Part I The Castle in the Forest (Random House)Now in his eighties, Norman Mailer has forsaken the violence and declarative sentences of his signature style for the gradual somber analytics of a style like that of Thomas Mann. Here, we discuss this unexpected change and his new novel's subject: the childhood of Adolf Hitler. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Robert Stone Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (Ecco)Robert Stone has written novels that are said to be the best descriptions of the American 1960's. In this memoir, he travels back to revisit those troubled times. Now stripped of a novelist's resources--the invention of character, the ear for street talk--he recreates and reevaluates the sixties through the lens of a new century. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Colum McCann Zoli (Random House)Zoli, a Romani poet, is the latest heroine in Colum McCann's ongoing quest to understand the function of art. Gypsy women are not supposed to be taught to read and write. What's more, because Zoli's poetry is thought to betray her people, they exile her. Can an artist, as a rebel, have a home. Further, does art have a home. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Martin Amis House of Meetings (Knopf)Martin Amis has written a Russian novel--not just a Russian novel but a novel about the Gulags. More than this, it is a love triangle set in a prison camp, told by a survivor who is now, in the process of self-accusation and self-condemnation. How dare Amis write such a book. He did it because he could. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Vendela Vida Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (Ecco)The possibility that there are those who choose to escape or evade their identities enters our exploration of this quest-for-identity novel. In the cold arctic wastes of Lapland, Clarissa searches for her mother and true father. From her desk in California, Vendela Vida asks if these discoveries do, in fact, reveal anything at all. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Gore Vidal Point to Point Navigation (Doubleday)Using his recent memoir as springboard, Gore Vidal nimbly leaps from the history of prose narrative to the contemporary decline of culture in America. He reveals himself, yet again, as a master of all he surveys. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Isabel Allende In--s of My Soul (Harper Collins)Isabel Allende uncloaks In--s, a shrouded figure from the chronicles of Chilean history. She was a Conquistadora, a conspirator--but also a healer. In--s redirects the history of violent conquest, becoming a founder of hospitals, schools and institutions. How does this feminist precursor emerge from the tragic history of genocidal colonialism. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alice McDermott After This (Farrar, Straus&Giroux)Alice McDermott is a writer who believes in loading each facet of her work with resonance and significance, while composing an accessible, highly readable narrative. Here, we explore the details that reveal the hidden chain of meaning connecting the book's themes of religious grace, love and war. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dave Eggers What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney's) Autobiography, epic, documentary, novel--Dave Eggers explores the many facets of his protean new work. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mary Gordon The Stories of Mary Gordon (Pantheon) Mary Gordon makes distinctions. She writes only about characters who interest her, people she would be willing to meet and spend time with. These discriminations provide the structure for her work--stories that are full of careful avoidances and the occasional unexpected embrace. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Brian Evenson The Open Curtain (Coffee House) The mystery at the heart of The Open Curtain derives from a violent, concealed episode in Morman history. In this conversation, the author explores the Mormon imagery in his work and the personal and artistic crises that culminated in his departure from the church. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Francine du Plessix Gray Them: A Memoir of Parents(The Penguin Press)After an affair with the great Russian poet Mayakovsky, Francine du Plessix Gray's mother married a man who became a kingpin in the Cond- Nast fashion magazine empire. All the high fashion and social elite of New York are discussed, but they pale beside the evocation of true genius. Mayakovsky and poetry triumph over commerce. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Salman Rushdie Shalimar the Clown(Random House)Although the history of Kashmir provides the backdrop of Rushdie's new novel, it is a larger-than-life romance with larger-than-life characters--a version of Romeo and Juliet and theRamayana. In this conversation, he describes the ways in which an historical conflict can determine the course of love.Read an excerpt from the book. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website John Lahr Honky Tonk Parade: The New Yorker Profiles (Overlook) The theater critic for The New Yorker explains the autobiographical origins of his profiles. His father was the great clown Bert Lahr--but the cowardly lion tended toward silence at home. Lahr follows his subjects from stage to living room in order to understand the strange impulse to perform. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Tim Winton The Turning (Scribner's) Tim Winton has been declared a National Treasure in his native Australia. His characters are ordinary people defined by narrow economic choices, by the facts of weather and geography, and by their addictions. We talk about how, as characters recur in story after story, they acquire the spiritual dimension that is the hallmark of Winton's fiction. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Myla Goldberg Wickett's Remedy (Doubleday) The author of Bee Season tiptoes toward an acknowledgement of her dark vision. She has written a novel in which almost every character dies in the 1918 influenza epidemic--and their ordinary lives, in general, are no picnic. Since Goldberg is a hopeful person, how did her work turn so grim? Read an excerpt from the book. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website John Carlin and Art Spiegelman Masters of American Comics (Hammer/MOCA/Yale)Curator and comics expert John Carlin joins Art Spiegelman in a lively discussion of this sumptuously illustrated volume that contains essays by Jules Feiffer on Popeye, Matt Groening on Gary Panter, Jonathan Safran Foer on Art Spiegelman, and more.Read an excerpt from the book. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hispanic Identity in Writing (Part 8 of 10) Sandra Cisneros and Nina Marie MartinezThe two Hispanic women explain how they've been put into the cage of multiculturalism, sometimes by the way they view themselves, but primarily by publishers and readers--to the extent of being expected to read only certain kinds of literature. When the names Thomas Pynchon and Marguerite Duras come up, the conversation takes a turn, and the satisfactions of broad, deep reading are embraced.You can read anoverview of the seriesor excerpts from:Sandra C ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Beyond Identity--A Dark Vision (Part 9 of 10) Tom Wolfe, Margaret Atwood and John BanvilleTom Wolfe discusses neuroscience and its view that there is no such thing as identity--a powerful computer might be able to predict human behavior. He speculates on the coming of a vast psychological depression. Margaret Atwood talks about the coming threat to identity by cloning and genetic experimentation The Irish writer John Banville rails that identity does not exist. You can read anoverview of the seriesor excerpts from:Tom Wolfe'sI Am Ch ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Asian Identity in Writing (Part 7 of 10) Susan Choi, Maxine Hong Kingston and Don LeeAmerican-born writers of Asian descent explore the challenge of forging identity, while living"between cultures."You can read anoverview of the seriesor excerpts from:Susan Choi'sAmerican WomanMaxine Hong Kingston'sThe Fifth Book of Peace Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf) How does a writer handle personal tragedy? In this conversation, Joan Didion explores the possibility that writing about her husband's death and her daughter's illness was an essential activity, enabling her to both grieve and mourn. Read an excerpt from the book. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Annie Proulx Brokeback Mountain (Scribner)Annie Proulx expresses her passion for accuracy of detail and truth of character. She is one of the lucky few writers to see those qualities brought to the film adaptation of her work. We discuss Ang Lee's film Brokeback Mountain and the ways in which it reflects the author's vision. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mary Gaitskill Veronica (Pantheon) Michael Silverblatt confesses that he is frightened by Mary Gaitskill's intensely forward work. Gaitskill confides that sometimes she is frightened by the world she writes about. In this exploratory conversation, they attempt to arrive at an understanding of the deceptive role that point-of-view plays in transgressive writing, such as hers. Read an excerpt from the book. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ted Thompson, Jonathan Safran Foer and Kelly Link Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs and Some Other Things... (Mc Sweeney's) McSweeney's has assembled a sublimely playful anthology of stories for YAs (young adults as they're called in the booksellers' trade). Here, we'll talk to editor Ted Thompson and some of the writers (Jonathan Safran Foer andKelly Link) about how the stories were chosen, who the target audience is, and how it feels to be associated with the very hip folks at McSweeney's. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bookworm Series Finale (Part 10 of 10) Maya Angelou believes that a writer who tells the truth can be read by anyone. James Baldwin, for example, can be enjoyed by black, white, Moslem or Jewish readers -- indeed by anyone who values reading the truth. Great literature takes us out of the limiting cage of identity politics -- into the realm of truth.You can read anoverview of the seriesor excerpts from:Maya Angelou'sI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Stanley Crawford Petroleum Man(Overlook)In this satire of corporate greed, a"gas-guzzling" super-magnate writes a loving description of every car he has ever owned. What is more, he intendsto leave this chronicle of automotive ownership to his (largely indifferent) grandchildren. This, it is implied, is our great American Heritage. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Robert Coover, Part 1 of 2 A Child Again(McSweeney's)Robert Coover, a reigning master of experimental narrative, gives a two-part interview for this, his long-anticipated first visit to Bookworm. In part one, Coover offers an overview of his career, revealing that even from the first his themes, intentions and methods were fully imagined. He then worked on these retold fairy tales and comic political allegories sometimes for a decade or more before completion and publication. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Jane Smiley 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel(Knopf)Join us for an informal conversation in which two novel-lovers share their deep passions for reading. Jane loves the realists (Austen,Trollope); Michael the Bookworm loves the inventors (Kafka,Cervantes). But more than anything, they love"a lengthy written narrative with a protagonist"the novel.Read an excerpt from the book. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bret Easton Ellis Lunar Park(Knopf)Beginning as an autobiography, Lunar Park turns into a classic horror novel. The haunted house, however, is spooked by Bret Ellis- personal demons, and the past comes alive increepy ways that go way beyond autobiography. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Umberto Eco The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana(Harcourt)The loss of memory is Umberto Eco-s subject here. After a stroke, an antiquarian bookseller remembers every book he's read--but he remembers nothing about himself. In this conversation, Eco talks about the difference between memories"made of paper" and vital memories--those transformed by the experience of love.Read an excerpt from the book. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nicole Krauss The History of Love: A Novel(Norton)Memory is the subject of many novels, but Nicole Krauss'subject is the transmission of memory: how do you tell another person about the things that are no longer there? We discuss how writing serves as the great transmitter of memory. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Christopher Sorrentino Trance(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)Sorrentino takes the Patty Hearst saga as the springboard for an exploration of the mass hypnosis of American culture. A funny thing though: this novel about intergenerational warfare is written by the son of formidable avante-gardiste Gilbert Sorrentino. How did Chris write about the young fighting the old establishment and still pay tribute to his dad? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Colm T-ib-n The Master(Scribner)The winner of this year-sLos Angeles Times award for fictionreveals the difficultiesof writing about the life of Henry James. It is impossible to imitate the Master's complex style--that goes without saying. But how to handle the discretions of James'hidden sexual desires, how to give shape to the invisible presences in James'world?Read an excerpt from the book. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Louise Erdrich The Painted Drum(Harper Collins)This beautiful short novel emerged over a period of ten years, after an older story suddenly suggested deeper meanings. Erdrich wrote the novel in layers, gradually, like a painter working with oils. Choosing texture over simple narration is our subject.Read an excerpt from the book. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go(Knopf)Ishiguro never tells more than he has to--his stripped-down narratives are filled with absence and mystery. In this science fiction derived narrative, he refuses to follow convention-he doesn't invent a complete world. Instead, he wants us, as readers, to fill in the gaps while he clobbers us with sinister surprises.Read an excerpt from the book. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Jewish Identity in Writing (Part 5 of 10) Art Spiegelman, Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan RosenCartoonist and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman explains how writers'identities are revealed in their work, that reading a book is like crawling into the writer's head. Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Rosen talk about the immigrant experience and the Jewish American novel. You can also read anoverview of the seriesor excerpts from:Cynthia Ozick'sHeir to the Glimmering World Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Jewish Identity in Writing (Part 5 of 10) Art Spiegelman, Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan RosenCartoonist and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman explains how writers'identities are revealed in their work, that reading a book is like crawling into the writer's head. Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Rosen talk about the immigrant experience and the Jewish American novel. You can also read anoverview of the seriesor excerpts from:Cynthia Ozick'sHeir to the Glimmering World Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website African Americans and Identity in Writing (Part 4 of 10) Rita Dove, Edward P. Jones, Alice Walker and Jayne CortezPulitzer Prize winning poet Rita Dove reads her thrilling poem"Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove" and discusses black identity and American culture. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward P. Jones talks about the history of slavery; Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award-winner Alice Walker explains that writing must address a worldwide crisis; and poet, spoken-word artist and activist Jayne Cortez talks about the W ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sexuality and Literary Theory (Part 6 of 10) James McCourt, Camille Paglia, Alan Hollinghurst and Edmund WhiteJames McCourt discusses the emergence of"queer identity" and gives an overview of French literary theories and their influence on multiculturalism--while Camille Paglia explains the destructive nature of such theories. Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst, who writes about the gay experience, reveals that he reads very little popular gay literature. Edmund White explains how he has turned away from the aesthetic an ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Place and Identity (Part 3 of 10) J. D. McClatchy has traveled the U.S. visiting the homes of classic American writers. Joan Didion talks about her native California; Jonathan Lethem describes growing up in Brooklyn; and Toni Morrison describes the creation of an imaginary home, a hotel, in her most-recent novel.You can also read anoverview of the seriesor excerpts from:J. D. McClatchy'sAmerican Writers at HomeToni Morrison'sLoveJoan Didion'sWhere I was FromJonathan Lethem'sThe Fortress of Solitude Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Creation of Identity (Part 2 of 10) Russell Banks, E. L. Doctorow and Norman MailerWe hear from E. L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer, but the focus is on Russell Banks, a white, male, American writer, who started his career in a specific part of the world, the American Northeast. He has explored identity throughout his career, using it as a narrative tool. He believes that good writing transcends the mythology of identity.You can also read anoverview of the seriesor excerpts from:Russell Banks'The DarlingE.L. Doctorow'sSweetland ... 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