Bookworm

Rachel Kushner talks about the earliest impulses that inspired her first novel Telex from Cuba. She wanted a new concept of time, she needed to find a voice to create that highly subjective and changeable thing--the past.

The discussion takes up writers who write about the racial "other." Can every writer do it successfully? Are there writers who shouldn't or can't? When is it appropriate and necessary?

In discussing Claudia Rankine's Citizen, an American Lyric, we discuss the way racism catches us all. 

Joyce Carol Oates shapes a novel from the Tawana Brawley scandal of the 1980's.

In Peter Cole's poetry, the Jewish mystical tradition gives rise to transmission of the spiritual vision.

The possibility of a romantic adventure novel written in the repressive language of a dictatorship like China's would be entirely heartbreaking if it weren’t so funny. It would be very funny if it weren’t so heartbreaking.

Can we truly understand another human being?

Letter to Jimmy is Congolese author Alain Mabanckou’s book-length letter to James Baldwin. 

Frank Bascombe, who's been making appearances since Ford's breakthrough novel, appears again in Richard Ford's latest novel.

Lydia Millet's new novel is fast-moving and funny -- except when it isn't.