Bookworm

David Sedaris is hilarious but that’s just the obvious. He discusses the art of melancholy, and mortality, topics in his new book of humorous stories, Calypso.

Nicola Lubitsch joins film historian Joseph McBride to discuss her father, Ernst, and McBride’s book about him, How Did Lubitsch Do It?

We share an episode of a KCRW podcast produced in collaboration with McSweeney's.

Characters in Lauren Groff’s collection of stories, Florida, try to meet the challenges of staying alive while life becomes more and more difficult.

In Days of Awe: Stories, A.M. Homes writes about characters who turn out not to be who they hoped to be, and unable to escape who they are.

Bewildered imagination finds a home in the stories of Rita Bullwinkel's Belly Up.

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight alters the rules about how big a novel’s canvas can be; it gives the feeling of completeness without telling all the secrets.

Michael Ondaatje fully embraces the fun of storytelling in this miracle of a novel, Warlight.

Mary Gaitskill’s collection of essays, Somebody with a Little Hammer, explores prismatic perspectives on rich topics, including literature.

Linda Spalding’s novel, A Reckoning, based on her family history, describes past nightmares that trickle into today.

The poetry of Cape Verdean Blues is organic, melancholic, and gorgeous. Shauna Barbosa starts with feeling, shines with honesty, and questions everything.

Joyce Carol Oates discusses A Book of American Martyrs, a novel about what women are going to make of the American dream.

Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath is a book about the nightmare of feeling not enough, Jamison travels all 360 degrees of wanting to be the best and the worst, and has a great struggle to live in the middle ground.

Rachel Kushner discusses The Mars Room, a novel set in a women’s correctional facility, a dazzling novel full of surprising details that can’t be forgotten.

Carol Muske-Dukes discusses her book, Blue Rose. The poetry is written at the highest level but it’s about daily life: poetry as life story.

Christine Schutt says her writing takes place in a danger zone. In Pure Hollywood, one novella and ten stories, she writes beyond weird, at a level that both frightens and empowers.

Devastatingly beautiful, soulful, a fulfillment of a promise to his goddaughter, Junot Diaz’s Islandborn offers a new map into children’s books.

A novel trapped in the mind of a very unusual man. Lynne Tillman writes with wit that makes the reader dance.

A transcendent apocalyptic satire, an outrageous improvisation of a book, embedded with the rhythms of American prose, Sean Penn discusses his first novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff.

Roberta Allen says every truth can work as fiction. She discusses writing into the essence of a story. The Princess of Herself is interconnected stories of familiar but monstrous people not normally written about.