Bookworm

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August Kleinzahler Jan 27, 2005

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Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A a single, perfectly placed phrase brings an essay about the death of August Kleinzahler's brother to a heart-breaking, unforgettable conclusion...

Alan Hollinghurst Jan 13, 2005

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The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury) Allan Hollinghurst-s Booker Prize-winning novel pits the aesthetic sensibility against the deprivations of Margaret Thatcher-s London-here seen as the protagonist-s largely frustrated war against ingrained social gay-bashing.

Russell Banks Jan 06, 2005

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The more closely you investigate Russell Banks' powerful new novel, The Darling, the stranger it becomes. Set in Liberia, it explores its heroine's narcissistic wound....

Orhan Pamuk Dec 23, 2004

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Snow (Knopf)
Turkey's preeminent novelist, Orhan Pamuk, has decided to write a political novel-without a political agenda. The result resembles -- but not quite -- the great metaphysical novels he's written previously...

Courtney Angela Brkic Dec 16, 2004

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The Stone Fields

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Courtney Angela Brkic recruited her forensic skills to help exhume and identity bodies from besieged villages in Bosnia. She is American born, of Serbo-Croatian lineage. This conversation, then, is about the pain of ancestral memory and the consequences of direct contact with the dead.

Louis de Bernières Dec 09, 2004

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Birds without Wings (Knopf)

In a conversation about the birth of the conflicts that beset us, Louis de Bernières (Corelli's Mandolin) talks about a Turkish village where difference is so ordinary that a Muslim religious leader can ask a Catholic priest for advice...

Kem Nunn Dec 02, 2004

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Tijuana Straits (Scribner)

The inventor of "surf-noir," Kem Nunn, describes how the evil of the world offers an opportunity for a writer of thrillers to structure a tale of redemption.

Don Lee: Country of Origin Nov 25, 2004

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Country of Origin (Norton)
Multi-racial ethnicity underlies the mystery in this literary thriller by Korean-American writer Don Lee, who spent much of his childhood first in Japan and then in Korea....

Carlos Ruiz Zafon Nov 18, 2004

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The Shadow of the Wind (Penguin)
Spaniard Carlos Ruiz Zafón discusses the way he utilizes "modern narrative technologies" to re-tool the traditional novel and create a work filled with history, terror and love--but also with uncertainty, deconstruction and despair.

William H. Gass: Reading Rilke Nov 11, 2004

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The greatest living writer of prose in English explores his deepest influence: Rainer Maria Rilke. In this conversation, we witness the interpretation of two modern masters.

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