Bookworm

Saturday (Doubleday)

Ian McEwan's first book since his stunning Atonement, is one of the first novels written in response to 9/11 and worldwide threats of terrorism. It explores of the forces of order and chaos that shape contemporary society....

In Lunar Follies (Coffee House), one of his genre-defying extravaganzas, Gilbert Sorrentino describes outlandish art shows, all of them taking place in galleries named for mountain ranges and craters of the moon...

We explore the hallucinatory intensity of Steve Erickson's visionary novel born out of the anxiety provoked by the imagined loss of a child....

The Fall of Heartless Horse by Martha Kinney (Akashic); Grab Bag by Derek McCormack (Akashic)

Two young writers and their editor tell about their new books for a new publishing house: McKinney, in the style of a Scottish border ballad, chronicles the fall of a suburban family, while McCormack employs wicked understatement to celebrate a depraved childhood...

Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (Pantheon)

Firebrand Paglia devotes her energies to a vibrant demonstration of how to read poetry, attacking the theorists who've made understanding a poem preposterously complex, and passionately defending the poems she's chosen that represent poetry at its greatest....

Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
In the second part of our conversation, we explore the historical and social forces that shape Marilynne Robinson's narrator, John Ames, and, by extension, the Protestant Church...

Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The loveliness of life, life itself as a blessing, is the subject of Marilynne Robinson's beautiful book. In this first of a two-part conversation, we discuss her narrator, a preacher, and his troubled relations with the world and the people around him.

A wizard of a storyteller, Greenblatt combines prodigious historical research and encyclopedic knowledge to conjure a vision of life and love in Elizabethan England.

Heir to the Glimmering World (Houghton Mifflin)
Eccentric and beautiful, Cynthia Ozick's novel is about an immigrant family's attempts to preserve a dying esoteric tradition....