Bookworm

The Lacuna (Harper)

What do Leon Trotsky, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera have to do with an invented author of Mayan and Incan historical romances?

Wallace Shawn’s newest play intermingles fact and fantasy in such a bizarre and original way that one would have to see (or even read) the play two or three times to get things (relatively) straight. Shawn discusses innovative theater in relation to his political beliefs as expressed in his new collection of essays.

The Museum of Innocence (Knopf)
The Nobel Prize helped to set the fiction of Orhan Pamuk (and Turkish literature in general) in a contemporary global frame. Our conversation centers on the problem of national versus global literatures...

The Museum of Innocence (Knopf)
Infidelity and adultery are two of the great subjects of the novel tradition — think of Anna Karenina or Madam Bovary. In this conversation, Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk discusses his own stunning contribution to this tradition.

The Children's Book  (Knopf)
As the vast array of subjects presented in A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book parades past — puppetry, women's rights, Fabianism, Peter Pan, education, children's fiction, the history of pottery glazes — one can't help but wonder: how does it all hold together?

Though he’s had five books published, Tao Lin is not yet thirty. Yet, for all his industriousness, he expresses the apathy and emptiness felt by many of his generation.

Practical Water ( Wesleyan)

Brenda Hillman's work has been described as difficult and experimental, but we beg to disagree. Here, we hear some of her most accessible poems; discuss her work with Code Pink, a feminist activist group; and try to describe the way to read a so-called "difficult" poem.

The live broadcast of this interview will be pre-empted by special holiday programming, but will be available in the KCRW archives.

Margaret Atwood thinks she has done something new: her novel takes place simultaneously with Oryx and Crake — her nightmare novel about the biotechnological future...

As Is  (Copper Canyon)
One of our most tender poets (tough but tender), James Galvin, investigates his growing tendency toward poems that express his bitterness— toward politics, environmental despoilment, big business. Still he affirms, in poems that breathe with sweet relief, the ongoing possibility of love.

The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster)
The polymath Nicholson Baker has been able to create a version of himself in the figure of accomplished poet Paul Chowder...