KCRW's Bookworm

Nicholson Baker

podmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:30:00 EST

The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster)
The polymath Nicholson Baker has been able to create a version of himself in the figure of accomplished poet Paul Chowder...

Nick Laird

podmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:20:21 EST

Glover's Mistake (Viking)
In this novel of love, manipulation and deception, Nick Laird attempts one of the trickiest strategies in the novelist's tool kit. He structures a book so that readers come to understand things the characters remain blind to.

Lorrie Moore

podmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:00:40 EST

A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf)
Lorrie Moore has written three collections of short stories and two rather short novels. Now, after eleven years of work, she has published a longer novel and survived to tell the tale...

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

podmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:01:07 EST

The Angel's Game (Doubleday)
Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón has attracted an international audience with his series of metaphysical thrillers.

Dennis Cooper

podmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:30:00 EST

Ugly Man (Harper Collins)

Although we've followed the career of Dennis Copper from the ground up, in this conversation, he acknowledges a new influence?the master director of French film comedy, Jacques Tati.

Alvaro Uribe and Cristina Rivera-Garza

podmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:17:00 EST

Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Dalkey Archive)
This new anthology makes clear that magical realism is only a tiny segment of what?s been happening in Mexican fiction over the last half-century. In this conversation with its editor, Álvaro Uribe, and Cristina Rivera-Garza, one of the writers whose work appears in the book, we uncover a cavalcade of styles and influences, as well as a host of writers whose names will be new to American readers.

Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman

podmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:41:00 EST

Road Show, a recording of the musical (Nonesuch, PS Classics)
Stephen Sondheim is right ? his new musical, Roadshow, is not gloomy. Sondheim and his collaborator, playwright John Weidman, discuss the many revisions of the musical that has evolved in an extraordinary way, and may yet become an American classic...

Clancy Martin

podmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EST

How to Sell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Clancy Martin's first novel reads like a piece of sleaze, but it turns out ? surprise! ? to be a philosophical novel about the problems of appearance and reality...

Colum McCann

podmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:04:17 EST

Let the Great World Spin (Random House)

Darkened by intimations of 9/11, Column McCann's generous extravaganza of a novel brings together the lives of strangers who witness a high-wire artist dancing between the two World Trade Center towers...

Reif Larsen

podmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EST

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Penguin Press)

Reif Larsen's T. S. Spivet, twelve-year-old genius cartographer, compulsively maps everything...