Bookworm

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.

Two brilliant writers talk about a brilliant writer: Ann Beattie and Richard Bausch discuss the haunted dreamscapes of the short fiction of Peter Taylor.

For The Monk of Mokha, Dave Eggers writes the story of Mokhtar Alkhanshali bridging the country of his ancestors with the country where he lives. This is a conversation about the fate of immigrant life in America.

André Aciman takes the intensity, complexity, and variety of his Call Me by Your Name still further in his new novel, Enigma Variations.

Scott McClanahan discusses two of his close-to- the-bone and personal novels: The Sarah Book and Crapalachia: A Biography of Place.

Víctor Terán and David Shook discuss the music of Isthmus Zapotec and poetry translated for Like A New Sun.

Matthew McIntosh’s theMystery.doc asks a reader to consider what a book is, while exploring how a book can be like life.

Jane Gillette describes the wicked writing of her first book, The Trail of the Demon and Other Stories.