Bookworm

Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Pantheon); The Said Reader (Vintage)

A passionate conversation about exile, literature and critical theory. Palestinian-born Edward Said discusses his work: from his early philosophical criticism, through critique of imperialism, to his recent memoir.

The inventor of a new style of lyrical essay writing, John D'Agata talks about the classical traditions he draws upon and the special American loneliness that resonates in his unusual sentences...

The Soul of Rumi (Harper San Francisco)

Rumi's ancient mystical poetry swings between ideals of transcendence and destruction. Coleman Barks explores the extreme polarities that underlie the work...

When The Corrections appeared, it was immediately nominated as a candidate for The Great American Novel. Jonathan Franzen discusses his manner of writing, his method of construction, and the possibility that his book advocates a family values-based neo-conservatism.

Austerlitz (Random House)
What Thomas Mann was to the 1940's and Albert Camus to the 1950's probably places the German writer W. G. Sebald in relation to our new century. In this conversation, Sebald describes the source of his rare prose tone and explores the invisible presence of the concentration camps in his work.

Political Fictions (Knopf)

We discover that the strategy underlying Joan Didion's essays also provides the foundation for her fiction. She rejects the human need for stories with clear resolutions and, instead, searches out the messy realities that stories conceal.

Death of a River Guide (Grove)

In this novel, a drowning river-guide in Tasmania relives his life as it recedes before him. Author Richard Flanagan insists that reality in his island homeland is stranger still...

David Means, the young winner of the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award discusses his interest in redemption, an impulse that transforms his tightly calibrated realistic fiction into a moral tightrope-walk.

Little America (Knopf)

Author Henry Bromell, the son of a CIA agent, discusses the traps, secrets and patricidal rivalries that can turn father-son relationships into metaphors for espionage...

(Houghton Mifflin)