Bookworm

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon)

Charles Yu's sweeter-spirited vision of how vintage science fiction can be used to imagine our world. Caught in a computer game, the hero seeks to escape his chronic melancholy. It just so happens that our hero's name is the same as the author's...

The Four Fingers of Death (Little, Brown)

Rick Moody creates a sleazoid end-of-the-world saga, basing his story on a cheapo so-bad-it's-good sci-fi classic...

What Is Left the Daughter (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Howard Norman's Wyatt Hillyer has good reason to be blocked: His parents committed

Super Sad True Love Story (Random House)

Can Lenny and Eunice find love in a futuristic America in which computer screens instantly and constantly reveal economic status and sexual "hotness" quotients?

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (Riverhead Books)

Maile Meloy’s stories go shooting off in such surprising and unpredictable directions that a reader might think, "every which way is the only way she wants it..."

The Lovers (Harper Collins/ Ecco)

Vendela Vida has crafted another mysterious and beautiful novel about a woman's identity. This woman, Yvonne, is middle-aged, the oldest woman whose tightly-knit personality Vida has unraveled so far.

First, Sparks on Bookworm's new theme songs. Then poet Paul Muldoon (Maggot, from Farrar, Straus & Giroux) on how writing poems differs from writing song lyrics..

The Informer (Shaye Areheart Books)

Craig Nova has written a frightening novel about corruption in pre-Nazi Berlin. Especially frightening is Nova's perception that those times are so similar to ours...

Dear Money (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

In Martha McPhee's comic novel, a wizard of Wall Street promises he can change a novelist from a desperate bohemian into a "Master of the Universe," in a brief eighteen months. In this conversation, we explore the mis-marriage of aesthetics and greed...

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Extended interview with David Mitchell

Glowing front-page reviews and profiles proclaim David Mitchell to be "the real thing" and his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Random House), a masterpiece.