Bookworm

Brenda Hillman

Margaret Atwood

The Year of the Flood  (Doubleday)
Margaret Atwood thinks she has done something new: her novel, The Year of the Flood, takes place simultaneously with Oryx and Crake — her nightmare novel about the biotechnological future...

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 possibility of love.

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...

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.

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...

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Angel's Game (Doubleday)
Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón has attracted an international audience with his series of metaphysical thrillers.

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.

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 writers whose work appears in the book, we uncover a cavalcade of styles and influences, as well as a host of writers whose names will be new to American readers.  

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 American classic...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.