Bookworm

In Claudio Magris' Blameless, a museum of the implements of war and destruction is created to inspire peace. But this conversation is not just about war and peace.

Biographer Brad Gooch reveals that he traveled 2500 miles to trace Rumi's footsteps, learned Persian and spent eight years to write Rumi's Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love.

Has the feeling of doom become our weather? If so, Richard Bausch says he contends with contemporary life by writing about people coping with loss and sorrow.

Poet Ron Padgett reveals that in the 1960s, he found a dusty novel in a Manhattan bookstore. Originally written for teenage girls during World War I, Padgett has been playfully rewriting it ever since.

Steven Moore has gathered his book reviews and essays that take us from the Beats and the Fifties to practically yesterday or even tomorrow. 

Talamantez Brolaski is trans-gender and describes himself as a multi-gendered, racial and linguistic mongrel.  His poems chart a journey out of pain, confusion and darkness into a visionary state.

Selin, the heroine of Batuman’s autobiographical first novel, The Idiot, is an 18-year-old Harvard freshman of Turkish-American descent.  Set in 1995, the novel observes the rise of internet culture.  

Screenwriter and critic George Toles' study of writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson focuses on his more recent films, including Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood and The Master. Toles values tracking his deepest personal experiences while watching a movie.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Emil Ferris' debut graphic novel, is the diary of a ten-year-old girl obsessed with monsters who also believes she herself is a werewolf. 

Gary Groth, editor of Fantagraphics, publisher of some of the most notable graphic novels today, discusses the rise of comics, what makes a good graphic novel, and what his selection process is like.

Álvaro Enrigue's Sudden Death is the wild tale of a tennis match between the poet Francisco de Quevedo and the artist Caravaggio that transcends time and involves other historically transformative, and often combative, figures. Enrigue, who calls his impulse to write "visceral and erratic," was angered into starting this book by the 2008 financial crisis.

Rachel Cusk's novel Transit is the second in a planned trilogy. Cusk believes that humans have an innate grasp of form, a gift that makes us story-tellers. But the stories we tell ourselves can become traps.

In Erickson's intense, absorbing novel, the Twin Towers suddenly re-appear in the Dakota Badlands. This road novel is a trip through a phantom country where the American dream was never realized.

The North Koreans have tested a weapon called NK3, a weaponized nano-bacterium designed to confuse South Koreans. The test has spread around the world. As a result, the world has lost its memory. 

Padgett's poems stand in for the poems written by a bus driver in the Jim Jarmusch movie Paterson. Padgett experiences writing poetry as a natural activity, rather like brushing his teeth.

In the second half of our conversation with Ottessa Moshfegh, the author discusses her discomfort in this world but admits that there is a touch of self-parody in the title of this collection of stories. 

In the first of two conversations with Ottessa Moshfegh, the author reveals that she doesn't feel comfortable in this world. Her characters long for another world, as does Moshfegh.

Lynne Tillman's The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories, is a unique blend of short fiction, essays, and philosophical musings that defy categorization. 

In Don DeLillo's latest novel, Zero K, the practice of cryonics or freezing oneself to be awakened later, is in full, but secret swing.

Colson Whitehead's new great American novel depicts a real underground railroad that transports a fugitive slave to stops that defy time and history, highlighting the daily struggles of black people, past and present.