Bookworm

Some of the greatest prose highs of this American century are found in this vast anthology by Norman Mailer.

C. S. Godshalk, author of Kalimantaan (Holt). A startling first novel, set in Borneo, about the wars between order and nature. While the author claims the book is about love, this interview shows it to be equally about disappointment and loss.

Mark Doty, author of Sweet Machine (Harper Flamingo). Mark Doty reveals why his mandarin poetry is becoming, well, sleazier.

Jane DeLynn, author of Bad Sex Is Good (Painted Leaf Press). The urbane Jane DeLynn discourses on the difficulty of everything--from sex to simply breathing.

Dorothy Allison, author of Cavedweller (Dutton). Dorothy Allison's arrival as a significant voice in mainstream American fiction provokes questions of identity and the limits of truthfulness. How far can she go?

Timothy O'Grady author of I Could Read the Sky (Harvill). A collaborative novel consisting of prose by Tim O'Grady and photographs by Steve Pike, I Could Read the Sky is a devastating account of the lives of Irish workers in England. O'Grady explores his own uprooted nature and how he discovered his "voice.;"

A Tribute to Julio Cort---r. Stephen Kessler, the translator of Save Twilight (City Lights), the first volume of Cort---r's poetry to appear in English, discusses the great South American fabulist--his life, his lunacy, his politics, his surrealism, and his cat.

the jumping-off point for a conversation about the white writer's contribution

to a  discussion of race....

The urbane Gore Vidal on the emotional center of his newest "invention"...