Bookworm

Chronic (Graywolf)

The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award offers an impressive $100,000 prize to a poet entering the major phase of his/her career. We speak to this year's winner, D.A. Powell, and the chair judge, Linda Gregerson, to find out about poetry awards and how they are determined...

Private Life (Knopf)

Jane Smiley explores lives limited by repression, narrow scope and boundless ego, describing the sadness of

Parrot & Olivier in America (Knopf)

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Doubleday)

A little girl is able to taste sadness in her food. Her brother, who has become emotionally withdrawn, is able to turn himself into inanimate objects. Aimee Bender shows how by using the techniques of fairy tales, legends and magic realism, her novels and stories about family dysfunction are transformed into narratives about growth and change.

Role Models (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and The Possessed (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

John Waters’ gives a passionate description of his favorite books, and for good measure, Elif Batuman gives a lively count-down of her favorite Russian novels.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Higher mathematics and logic problems have long intrigued fiction writers, including Zachary Mason. Both Lewis Carroll (the Alice books) and Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita) had a profound love of logic and chess..

Self-Portrait Abroad (Dalkey Archive); Running Away (Dalkey Archive)

French fiction had become austere and theoretical until Jean-Philippe Toussaint took it in the direction of the wacky, even goony. His earlier stories focused on characters retreating from contemporary life, but that has given way to work with a light, lyrical approach...

Beatrice & Virgil (Spiegel & Grau)

After recognizing that most holocaust literature is centered on personal testimony, Yann Martel decided to create an allegory about the holocaust — a different approach to this traumatic material...

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf) and Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywolf Press)

New web technologies (and the ever-increasing availability of information) have made possible a new kind of writing. This prose uses fact and randomness rather than story and structure. Two active practitioners wave the banner for the new.