Bookworm

Selected Poems (Wave Books)
When you hear Mary Ruefle reading her poems, you will quickly become entranced by their accessibility: they are funny and heartbreaking—simultaneously...

Lord of Misrule (McPherson)

Jaimy Gordon is a recently-discovered American novelist with an original voice and vision. Her National Book Award-winning novel, Lord of Misrule, is set at Indian Mound Downs, a rinky-dink racetrack in Wheeling, West Virginia, a place where "scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain" dream of better luck someday....

Great House (Norton)

The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir ( Viking)

Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish (Archipelago); Intimate Stranger (Archipelago); Notes from the Middle World (Haymarket Books)

As a writer, South African-born Breyten Breytenbach is an activist. As an activist he functions as something like a conscience. As a participant in the global response to apartheid, he was imprisoned for seven years, and his writing comes from the anguished nightmares of his imprisonment. His is the art of passionate dissent; his prose and poetry are in service of a more "human" human race.

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (Norton)

This short novel emerged virtually whole — unique in the writing life of its author, Lan Samantha Chang. Perhaps this is because the book is about the writing life...

Take One Candle Light a Room (Pantheon)

The complexities of race and community are at the center of Susan Straight's lively discussion about family, memory, migration and history...

My Hollywood (Knopf)

Mona Simpson's new novel corkscrews its way into the heart of a Santa Monica marriage, a marriage in which child raising duties are agreed to be divided fifty-fifty between husband and wife. Instead, they are divided fifty-fifty between wife and nanny...

Bitter in the Mouth (Random House)

Monique Truong is an intransigent—she will not settle for anyone's desire to interpret or in any way falsity the world she knows. This time Vietnamese-born Truong sets to revealing the lies implicit in the question, "What is it like to grow up Asian in America?"

Tom McCarthy's C (Knopf) is one of those post-modern novels designed to drill a hole in your head and help you inventory the contents of your mind...