 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 :
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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 CareyHis 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 ReinesCoeur 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 ToibinMothers 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 EnrightThe 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 GrunbergThe 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. VollmanRiding 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 RieffSwimming 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 BrooksPeople 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 HydeThe 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 PlanteABC (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 PatchettRun (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 SaundersThe 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-DukesChanneling 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 EricksonZeroville (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 LlosaThe 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 KaufmanBowl 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 PadgettJoe: 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 AlterThe 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 DiazThe 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 Gonzaleztwin 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 ThomsonDeath 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 SeboldThe 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 CastilloThe 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 GibsonSpook 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 BerberianDas 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 WigginsThe 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 JulyNo 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 EnglanderThe 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 MurrThe 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 OndaatjeDivisadero (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 ViramontesTheir 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 VonnegutSupport 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 FlanaganThe 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 CraceThe Pesthouse (Doubleday)
Jim Crace
makes lies masquerade as truth in this post-apocalyptic tale of
toxified America.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | |