Bookworm

Latest Episodes:

Benjamin Weissman, with editor Dennis Cooper Apr 08, 2004

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Headless (Little House on the Bowery/Akashic Books)

Dennis Cooper is editing a new-fiction series for Akashic Books. Benjamin Weissman's Headless is one of the first of the new releases. Together, writer and editor discuss the poles of Weissman's work...

Doris Lessing: The Grandmothers Apr 01, 2004

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Doris Lessing, one of our most sage and canny living writers discusses the real stories behind her fiction....

Rita Dove Mar 25, 2004

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American Smooth (Norton)
When her house burned down, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove decided to learn formal ballroom dancing...

Clayton Eshleman Mar 18, 2004

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Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan) An exploration of Upper Paleolithic cave painting leads poet Clayton Eshleman to this meditation about hell and rebirth. This book, in poetry, prose and picture, marks the culmination of a thirty-year investigation of Pre-history.

James McCourt: Queer Street Mar 11, 2004

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Although camouflaged as a social history, James McCourt's "Queer Street" is a memoir of sexual initiation and awareness...

Maxine Hong Kingston Mar 04, 2004

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The Fifth Book of Peace (Knopf) A fire at home destroys her manuscript and reminds Maxine Hong Kingston of the firebombing of Vietnam. She extends the analogy of private loss and public tragedy to arrive at a novel whose purpose is to promote personal serenity and global peace.

Stuart Dybek Feb 26, 2004

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I Sailed with Magellan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Dream and reality are side by side in Stuart Dybek's short stories--but with a twist. As the sexual dreams of his adolescent characters are shaped by reality, those characters are transformed...

Tobias Wolff Feb 19, 2004

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Old School (Knopf)
This conversation illustrates the care Tobias Wolff takes with narrative revelation: every step reveals character, each twist and turn provides a clue to the nature of the mysteriously disagreeable man who narrates this first novel by master storyteller Wolff.

Toni Morrison Feb 12, 2004

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Love (Knopf)
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison shows how the careful arrangement of specific detail in her newest fiction, Love, forces the reader to participate in its structure.