By KCRW
Intellectual, accessible, and provocative literary conversations.
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Life and story go hand in hand in Margot Livesey’s “The Boy in the Field.”
Daphne Merkin discusses what normative means, the concept of a normal looking life, and her new novel, “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love”.
From the archives: obliquely about Zadie Smith's "On Beauty", this intense, abstract conversation is about what a novel is.
History, autobiography, travelogue—a hybrid form—"Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning", by Alex Halberst.
Scott Spencer’s new novel, “ An Ocean Without a Shore,” is about a life seeped in unfulfilled desires.
Brit Bennett pushes questions of race and color to their extremes in her new novel, The Vanishing Half.
The co-producer of Bookworm, Shawn Michael Sullivan, was able to rebroadcast one of his favorite shows, between Michael Silverblatt and Horacio Castellanos Moya, regarding Senselessness .
Fowzia Karimi speaks about the art of the novel, and designing Above Us the Milky Way.
Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Little Blue Kite is a generous and big-hearted children’s book about creating a spacious mind, with room for others.
Anthologist André Naffis-Sahely says he provided a historical perspective to The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature.
Victoria Chang discusses Love, Love, her children’s novel written in verse—poetry written for children.
Victoria Chang’s Obit is a poetry book about the impact of death on the living.
Benjamin Moser recently won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography Sontag: Her Life and Work . In this show from the archives, he talks about Susan Sontag‘s ideology: reading more books, going to more plays, traveling more, learning more, taking...
Daniel Kehlmann describes his new novel, Tyll , as dark, frightening, and murky—in a good way.
Youthful nihilism, contradictory impulses, preferences and desires catch up with Rob Doyle in his explicitly autobiographical novel Threshold.
Ariana Reines discusses her A Sand Book poetry being centered around a theme of hiding: running away and trying to escape.
Charles North describes Everything and Other Poems as “messy poetry” without the formal demands of his earlier work.
Harry Dodge’s My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing shifts its scale from the cosmos to viruses.
Recollections of My Nonexistence is a personal, cultural, political, and journalistic hybrid narrative about the formative years in the life of Rebecca Solnit.
Stephen Wright’s Processed Cheese finds hilarity in the tragedy of contemporary life.
Jenny Offill’s Weather is a book about people living very much in our times.
Steven Sater’s Alice By Heart wants to reaffirm the power of the imagination, and inspire readers to reignite the wonder in themselves.
Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown is a contemporary novel about dealing with the difficulty of being whoever you are.
A discovery readers have been waiting for, more Silvina Ocampo finally translated into English: The Promise and Forgotten Journey.
One of the first books within a huge movement that restored respectability to memoirs, This Boy’s Life celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, and Tobias Wolff celebrates thirty years since being on Bookworm.
Love and I , poems by Fanny Howe, about love, the failure of love, and the transformation of love over the years.
Garth Greenwell discusses seeking human truths by writing into an abyss, and his new novel Cleanness .
Daniel Mendelsohn’s Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones is an uncommon collection of essays that intertwine the personal with the intellectual and critical.
Jonathan Blum wrote characters with open destinies, in stories with open endings, for his new book of short stories, The Usual Uncertainties.
Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 find their synthesis in The Topeka School , the third in his Hegelian trilogy.
In André Aciman’s Find Me, strokes of luck are destiny.
Again Deborah Eisenberg demonstrates herself as a masterful and electric writer, in her new collection of seven stories, Your Duck Is My Duck .
Adina Hoffman’s " Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures" is about a man of multitudes.
Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown depicts life the way it is: jam packed with details, the closer you look the ever more there is.
And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks by Lawrence Weschler is a book that can only be itself.
From the archives, Ocean Vuong speaks of leaving his thumbprint on his new novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous . Alternate modes of storytelling are discussed, as are narratives without intrinsic conflict. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous...
Lynda Barry’s Making Comics is a how-to graphic novel guide for people who gave up on drawing.
Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story is about time travel and body travel.
Lynda Barry and Chris Ware discuss the culture of comics, and their new books, Making Comics and Rusty Brown .
John Freeman and Robin Coste Lewis discuss Freeman’s: The Best New Writing on California .
In tribute, from the archives, a conversation with Harold Bloom (1930-2019) in his apartment to talk about his book, The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible. A discussion officially about the great King...
Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work is interested in the writing and ideas of Susan Sontag.
Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte is explored as a modern take on the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, with the opera Don Quichotte by Jules Massenet a strong influence.
Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte depicts the pleasures of fiction.
The structure of Emma Donoghue’s Akin leads the reader through one surprise after another.
Language-loving twin sisters discover themselves united by passion but separated by needs in The Grammarians, the eleventh book by Cathleen Schine.
Dunce, by Mary Ruefle, finds meaning everywhere.
Katya Apekina’s novel The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish has a dark sense of humor, and an interest in the soul.
Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X belongs to a literary conversation about the grotesque and surreal.
Characters with DNA, blood and soul populate forty three stories and a novella by Peter Orner: Maggie Brown & Others .