Bookworm

Social historian Mary F. Corey joins David Remnic, the new editor of the New Yorker, for a look at the world as it was projected by this influential magazine in the 1950's. Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Mid-Century (Harvard). A social historian joins the new editor of the New Yorker for a look at the world as it was projected by this influential magazine in the 1950's.

Memories of My Father Watching TV (Dalkey Archive) This novel describes a man who remembers his father mostly through the TV shows they watched together...

Marina Warner "No; Go the Bogeyman" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) The dark side of fairy tales. A conversation about the cultural persistence of the threateners of children, ogres, cannibals, vampires and kidnapers-with a special guest appearance by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Harry Mathews "Oulipo; Compendium" (Atlas) Poet-novelist Harry Mathews discusses a unique literary movement and shows how strong emotion can penetrate even the most whimsical and arbitrary forms.

Bret Easton Ellis "Glamorama;" (Knopf) He has been rejected by critics and reviled by Gen X, yet Bret Easton Ellis reaches to the core of an eerie American phenomenon: the postmodern fusion of terror and irony.

Mitch Sisskind "Divine; Deception: The Inner Gender of Gender" (Earl University Press) A maverick scholar unravels the secret hoaxes that have masked the sexuality of many authors of Western Literature-from the Bible to the internet.

Nuruddin Farah "Secrets;" (Arcade) An extraordinary conversation about the Somali author's language and family. The sounds of a mother's speech patterns initiate a web of recollection-magic realism from a deep, personal wellspring.

Kevin Killian "Poet; Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance" (Wesleyan/New England) Jack Spicer was the maddest, loneliest and most inspired poet on the Berkeley arts scene. His biographer makes sense of Spicer's techniques for rearranging the senses.

Irvine Welsh "Filth;" (Norton) From anarchism (Trainspotting) to fascism (Filth): Irvine Welsh on his gallery of outsiders.

T.C. Boyle Stories (Viking) T.C. Boyle describes the styles and attitudes that have earned him a trademark in the writing of short stories.

A. L. Kennedy "Original; Sin" (Knopf) The first American publication ofthis lively and quirky member of the new Scottish renaissance. Talk aboutthe war between the sexes! Better yet, talk about a powerful new voice.

Re-imagining Shakespeare's life as a high-flying farce in Shakespeare in Love. We talk about gender, comedic structure and challenge of putting Shakespeare on the screen.

The new editor of the New Yorker on the techniques of the profile. How does one journalist master sports writing for his book on Ali, having won a Pulitzer for his anatomy of the new Russia?

A Man in Full (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) As a New Journalist, Tom Wolfe infiltrated sub-cultures: the Merry Pranksters,U.S. Astronauts, New York painters. In his novels, he aims for the bigpicture -- the whole cultural machine...

Cathleen Schine "The; Evolution of Jane" (Holt) A comedy of manners turns into a nightmare of subjectivity. Cathleen Schine on moving from third-to-first person narration-that is, from manners to madness.

Charity (Doubleday) An extended metaphor describes Mark Richard's fiction: the world as a charity ward where the deformed, the anguished and the damned seek rescue--or is it redemption?

The Museum Guard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Howard Norman has won awards for his extraordinary, quiet fiction, but he has rarely discussed its meanings...

The Letters of Mina Hacher (Hard Press) Post-modern feminism! Deconstructed Gothic horror! A character from Bram Stoker's Dracula meets the San Francisco literary scene...  

Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal (Norton). An Arctic expedition provides the setting for a confrontation between a reticent man of science and a raging egoist.

Michael Byers, author of The Coast of Good Intentions (Houghton Mifflin). This young short-story writer makes a really impressive debut. A look at his landscape (Washington state's coastline) and his influences ("steal; from the best").