Bookworm

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Arts
**Bookworm**

Intellectual, accessible, and provocative literary conversations.

Latest Episodes:

Jane Smiley Jul 03, 2003

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Good Faith (Knopf)

An ebullient book about fraud and deception-the eighties, Jane Smiley-style.

Don DeLillo: The Body Artist Jun 26, 2003

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Cosmopolis (Scribner's) and The Body Artist (Scribner's)

In this, the second of a two-part interview, Don DeLillo explores his most enigmatic creation: the weird gnome at the heart of his last novel, The Body Artist.

Don DeLillo: Cosmopolis Jun 19, 2003

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The deadpan master of post-modern dysfunction-comedy takes an ordinary New York traffic jam and transforms it into a funeral procession that guides his protagonist to defeat and death.

John Murray Jun 12, 2003

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A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies

(Harper Collins)

A young doctor who has worked in developing countries, John Murray has written a collection of stories in which chaos and order wrestle for domination...

Kate Moses May 29, 2003

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Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin-s) Kate Moses attempts and achieves the impossible: she weaves Sylvia Plath-s imagery and intensity into an interior landscape illuminating the last week of the great poet-s life. In the process, Moses creates a convincing portrait of a hypothetical Plath-one who has earned a mastery of her demons and a place in the Pantheon.

ZZ Packer May 22, 2003

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Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead)

With her extraordinarily confident language, newcomer ZZ Packer confronts issues of race, class and education that have flummoxed more-experienced writers...

Jessica Shattuck May 15, 2003

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The Hazards of Good Breeding (Norton) Jessica Shattuck skewers the narrow-minded prejudices of the Boston aristocracy. How did Shattuck, the daughter of a liberal lawyer and niece of a prominent literary critic, find the tenderness and insight necessary to give her characters human depth?

John D'Agata: The Next American Essay May 08, 2003

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This remarkable anthology presents a picture of what the American essay is, and what, with any luck, it may become.

William Gibson May 01, 2003

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Pattern Recognition (Putnam)

William Gibson, the inventor of cyber-punk, says that his new novel, though set in the future, is realistic...

Norman Mailer Apr 24, 2003

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The Spooky Art

(Random House)

Norman Mailer, the lion at eighty, stayed lair-bound long enough to assemble this collection of his thoughts about writing..