Bookworm

The Pacific and Other Stories (Penguin)

Mark Helprin's critics--who mainly regard him as a political conservative and, therefore, a traitor to imaginative literature--have made him into a martyr. Here, he fends off the slings and arrows to say what he believes a writer to be, and describes the values he wants his work to embrace.

Joy Williams, specialist in what should be called sorrowful hilarity, reads from her work Honored Guest. Pretty soon we discover that what we would call a sacrificial victim, she calls an honored guest...

The Volcano Lover
Novelist, essayist and driving intellectual force, Susan Sontag, died late last year. In her memory, we offer this conversation, first broadcast in October 1992. On this first visit to Bookworm, she spoke with great enthusiasm about her novel, The Volcano Lover and how she came to write -- of all things -- a romance.

Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A a single, perfectly placed phrase brings an essay about the death of August Kleinzahler's brother to a heart-breaking, unforgettable conclusion...

The more closely you investigate Russell Banks' powerful new novel, The Darling, the stranger it becomes. Set in Liberia, it explores its heroine's narcissistic wound....

Snow (Knopf)

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Courtney Angela Brkic recruited her forensic skills to help exhume and identity bodies from besieged villages in Bosnia. She is American born, of Serbo-Croatian lineage. This conversation, then, is about the pain of ancestral memory and the consequences of direct contact with the dead.

Birds without Wings (Knopf)