Bookworm

Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte is explored as a modern take on the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, with the opera Don Quichotte by Jules Massenet a strong influence.

Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte depicts the pleasures of fiction.

The structure of Emma Donoghue’s Akin leads the reader through one surprise after another.

Language-loving twin sisters discover themselves united by passion but separated by needs in The Grammarians, the eleventh book by Cathleen Schine.

Dunce, by Mary Ruefle, finds meaning everywhere.

Katya Apekina’s novel The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish has a dark sense of humor, and an interest in the soul.

Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X belongs to a literary conversation about the grotesque and surreal.

Characters with DNA, blood and soul populate forty three stories and a novella by Peter Orner: Maggie Brown & Others.

From the archives, a highly resonate conversation with Toni Morrison about transfiguring love, as portrayed in her novel Beloved.

Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison passed away this week at 88 years of age.  Bookworm is rebroadcasting a 2009 conversation with her about her novel, A Mercy.*

Literary legends Captain Ahab and Captain Nemo are pitted against each other by real life engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel in Howard Rodman’s The Great Eastern.

The poetry in Ariana Reines's A Sand Book is centered around the theme of hiding: running away and trying to escape.

Ocean Vuong speaks of leaving his thumbprint within his new novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Editor/poet David Trinidad, poet Amy Gerstler, and publisher Ruth Greenstein reflect on the dynamic mind behind Punk Rock is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith.

David Trinidad’s Swinging on a Star is a two-part collection of poems that put the human in pop culture.

 Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans is a polyphonic novel about social class and identity, with a revelation in every chapter.

A stunning graphic novel by one of the medium’s greatest creators, Seth’s Clyde Fans is about people living in a memory fog, and the strange reverie that life takes on when one grows older.

Ben’s life falls down around him, and he’s the protagonist, in A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, by master writer Ann Beattie.

The Parade, by Dave Eggers, is a book of creeping dread, where every worst thing is possible, and rational reason leads one to expect that the worst is not over.

About the interdependence between humans and trees, Richard Powers found a place for the non-human in literary fiction with his new book, The Overstory.