Bookworm

Latest Episodes:

Yann Martel: Life of Pi Sep 11, 2003

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Booker Prize-winning author Yann Martel makes a distinction between the playful, surprise-filled surface of his novel and its spiritual purpose...

Joseph McElroy (Part 2 of 2) Sep 04, 2003

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Relationships and marriage, violence and loss, houses and homes are the deeply conventional subjects that occupy this unconventional novel. In the second part of a two-part interview, Joseph McElroy shows how his oblique techniques evoke and mirror the emotional intricacies of our daily lives.

Joseph McElroy (Part 1 of 2) Aug 28, 2003

Show notes

Joseph McElroy, one of the innovative masters of narrative, gives a rare two-part interview. This week, we talk about the way the novelist strives to represent the workings of consciousness, and the new techniques necessary to create a facsimile of the way memory is structured.

Carol Muske Dukes Aug 21, 2003

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Sparrow (Random House)
This collection of elegies for actor David Dukes, the poet's late husband, inspires a conversation about death, role-playing and ghosts. Most surprising, we discover an unexpected spectral visitation in one of the poems.

Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly Aug 14, 2003

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Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night (Harper Collins)
A new Little Lit is always an event, and this one has work by the dreaded Lemony Snicket and a fabulous four-page Breughel-like phantasmagoria by the Where's Waldo? guy. This volume of comix for kids -- the third -- definitely does justice to its name!

Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake Aug 07, 2003

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Margaret Atwood on her nightmare novel about the biotechnological future...

Siri Hustvedt Jul 31, 2003

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What I Loved

(Holt)

A harrowing subject: the child of an artist giving way to crime, drugs and dishonesty. A harrowing conversation with author Siri Hustved: is the child's amorality genetic or did post-modern art corrupt him?

Alice McDermott: Child of My Heart Jul 24, 2003

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An unusually tender conversation with Alice McDermott about grace, imagined here as the act of putting others before oneself...

Monique Truong Jul 17, 2003

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The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin)
The Vietnamese cook in the famous Paris house of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas narrates Monique Truong's first novel...