Bookworm

Louise Erdrich's beautiful short novel emerged over a period of ten years, after an older story suddenly suggested deeper meanings...

Kazuo Ishiguro never tells more than he has to -- his stripped-down narratives are filled with absence and mystery. 

(Harcourt)

The loss of memory is Umberto Eco's subject here. After a stroke, an antiquarian bookseller remembers every book he's read--but he remembers nothing about himself....

The History of Love: A Novel (Norton)

Maya Angelou believes that a writer who tells the truth can be read by anyone. James Baldwin, for example, can be enjoyed by black, white, Muslim or Jewish readers -- indeed by anyone who values reading the truth...

Tom Wolfe discusses neuroscience and its view that there is no such thing as identity. Margaret Atwood talks about the coming threat to identity by cloning and genetic experimentation. Irish writer John Banville rails that identity does not exist.

Sandra Cisneros and Nina Marie Martínez

The two Hispanic women explain how they've been put into the cage of multiculturalism, sometimes by the way they view themselves, but primarily by publishers and readers, to the extent of being expected to read only certain kinds of literature. When the names Thomas Pynchon and Marguerite Duras come up, the conversation takes a turn, and the satisfactions of broad, deep reading are embraced...