Bookworm

I Sailed with Magellan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Dream and reality are side by side in Stuart Dybek's short stories--but with a twist. As the sexual dreams of his adolescent characters are shaped by reality, those characters are transformed...

Old School (Knopf)
This conversation illustrates the care Tobias Wolff takes with narrative revelation: every step reveals character, each twist and turn provides a clue to the nature of the mysteriously disagreeable man who narrates this first novel by master storyteller Wolff.

Love (Knopf)
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison shows how the careful arrangement of specific detail in her newest fiction, Love, forces the reader to participate in its structure.

Mr. Paradise (Morrow)

Raffish characters, extreme events and lewd jokes are signatures of the widely praised Elmore Leonard style....

(Harper Collins)

The critics loved Susan Choi's novelization of the Patty Hearst saga, but they barely mention the book's center, told from the point of view of the Asian-American woman who helped hide Hearst and her kidnapper comrades...

The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin)

Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story writer Jhumpa Lahiri defines her beliefs about writing: directness, simplicity, reality and emotional truth are her guideposts. How appropriate then that India-born Gogol, the hero of this new novel, should want to change his name....

Edmund White turns himself into Mrs. Trollope, the Victorian traveler who, in her last year, narrates a biography of her scandalous friend, the feminist Fanny Wright....

Over the course of his career, Edward Said produced compact and thrilling works that revolutionized the field of literary criticism. In his memory, Bookworm offers a conversation, first broadcast in 2002, in which Said talks about literature, critical theory, and exile.