Bookworm

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**Bookworm**

Intellectual, accessible, and provocative literary conversations.

Latest Episodes:

Joyce Carol Oates: The Gravedigger's Daughter Jun 07, 2007

Show notes

Oates's most autobiographical novel and the culmination of her career-long themes and obsessions.

Christine Schutt May 31, 2007

Show notes

A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer (Harcourt)
Prose impressionist Christine Schutt describes the painstaking intensity that allows her to perfect her cadences and the precision of her imagery. Her stories are built up draft upon draft, variation upon variation, until Schutt achieves a density that is both poetic and conclusive.

John Banville (as Benjamin Black): Christine Falls May 24, 2007

Show notes

Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville has written the first in a series of thrillers, and he's even taken on an alias or, at least, a nom de plume.

John Ashbery May 17, 2007

Show notes

A Worldly Country (Ecco)
In this landmark conversation, John Ashbery talks about his fascination with nonsense and fantasy, beginning with Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Those books involve incomprehension, parody and an extreme use of non sequitur--qualities that for Ashbery define the way we live now.

Brian Selznick May 10, 2007

Show notes

The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press)
The design and composition of this five hundred page picture book took Brian Selznick many years' work. Here, we talk about the influence of movies, especially French movies, especially the work of pioneer Georges Méliès. The talk about Méliès leads us to the spiritual mentors that haunt Selznick's vivid imagination.

Howard Norman May 03, 2007

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Devotion (Houghton Mifflin)
Betrayal and forgiveness are subjects here. Howard Norman's signature melancholy pervades this exploration of romance, and he shows us how even people who are perfect for one another have a need to betray and forgive--but not forget, never forget.

C.K. Williams Apr 26, 2007

Show notes

Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

C.K. Williams' Collected Poems covers a lifetime's concern with ethics and personal morality. As his work proceeds, he develops a quality of consciousness and empathy that some would describe as a soul. In this conversation, this accessible and plainspoken poet plumbs the depths, as we trace his concerns from poem to poem.

Vikram Chandra Apr 19, 2007

Show notes

Sacred Games (Harper Collins)

Gangsters, detectives, Bollywood movie stars--Chandra mobilizes the machinery of a thriller in order to reveal Bombay at its most various. Fascinating then, to hear him describe his novel as a mandala of perceptions in which characters reflect the worlds they move through, the plot enacting the clash between different beliefs about reality.

Norman Mailer, Part II Apr 12, 2007

Show notes

The Castle in the Forest (Random House)

In the second of this two-part 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.

Norman Mailer, Part I Apr 05, 2007

Show notes

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. In this first of a two-part interview, we discuss this unexpected change and his new novel's subject: the childhood of Adolf Hitler.

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