Bookworm

The Jewish Messiah (Penguin)

Unsettling, profane and goofy, Arnon Grunberg’s

Riding toward Everywhere (Ecco)
William Vollmann decided to spend as much time as possible viewing the stars from the flatbed of a moving train. He’s a “fauxbo” not a hobo, and he movingly describes his need to find freedom by hopping a train–without any destination in mind.

Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir (Simon & Schuster)
David Rieff accompanied his mother, Susan Sontag, through the medical ordeals that led to her death. We explore the death of this great writer, a woman who resisted consolation and maintained—to her last days—an enormous appetite for life.

People of the Book (Viking)
The art of detection unravels the secrets of the Sarajevo Haggadah. What does the miraculous survival of this medieval codex tell us about the survival of both culture and history?

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (Vintage)
How does the creative person function in a market culture? In the 25 years since The Gift was first published, this question has become increasingly more difficult to answer.

Sorry, Tree (Wave Books) and Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press) and Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press)

Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005 (Ecco)

Lost Paradise (Grove)

Oliver Sacks explores the brain's affinity for music by examining the extraordinary ways our brains adapt in response to musical aberrations. 

The Reserve (Harper)
Russell Banks, one of the great living American novelists, uses the 1930's novel of passion and betrayal -- with its allied seductions, madness, and adultery -- to explore America's class system; the relationships between art, politics and wealth; and the despoiling of the American Landscape. (An abridged version of this interview will be heard live on KCRW due to our semi-annual subscription drive. It will be archived in its entirety online.)