Bookworm

Reservation Blues The hip young novelist on his desire for fame, accessibility and rock stardom.

Interstate An interview about emotion in fiction. Dixon discusses his Dostoyevskyan ambition to render his complex extremity of feeling about the death of a fictional child.

Secret Life The poet discusses the difficulties of writing accurately and artistically about his ongoing recovery from sexually obsessive behavior.

Mark Helprin on the legacy of fathers...

The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Penny-dreadfuls, transvestitism, the English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey and Grand Guignol are touched on in this conversation about the underside of the Victorian Age.

My Father Was a Toltec The barriers of language, ethnicity, class and gender: the challenges faced by a Latina writer.

Off Stage Betty Comden who, with Adolph Green, his written for some of the theater's great clowns--Phil Silvers, Bert Lahr, Judy Holliday, Rosalind Russell, Nancy Walker--discusses the art of the musical comedy lyric.

This novel of punk-adolescence recalls the great American coming-of-age novels. In the examination of the voice of Bank's hero, homage is paid to his literary ancestor--Huck Finn...

Norman Mailer on the skills a novelist brings to the assembly of a historical record...