The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead)What brought the indomitable Sarah Vowell to write a book about the Puritans? A couple of Thanksgiving episodes of The Brady Bunch and Happy Days, to be sure, but also...

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Grégoire Bouillier The Mystery Guest: An Account (Farrar Straus & Giroux) and Report on Myself (Houghton Mifflin)Olivier Cadiot Colonel Zoo ( Green Integer)Marc Cholodenko Mordechai Schamz (Dalkey Archive)Finally at ease in Paris, the Bookworm encounters three French novelists and attempts to navigate the tangle of philosophy, artifice, intertextuality and hilarity that exemplifies the art of the new French novel. Note: More installments of an American Bookworm in Paris will air over the next few months.

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Lulu in Marrakech (Dutton)Here's a conversation about ambivalence, ambiguity and judgment in a comic or satiric novel. Usually, we would know exactly where the author stands, but not with Diane Johnson...

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Goldengrove (Harper)Francine Prose is full of surprises in speaking of her newest novel. It's narrated by a thirteen-year-old girl whose sister has drowned. It looks like a conventional coming-of-age-through-emotional-hardship book...

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How Fiction Works (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)This conversation is characterized by indirection. Critic James Wood seems to be responding to accusations made against him by other reviewers...

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Pierre Alféri: Oxo (Burning Deck) and Natural Gaits ( Sun & Moon) Emmanuel CarrèreClass Trip & The Mustache (Picador) and The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception (Picador)In this episode of our ongoing series, the American Bookworm leaves philosophy and politics and makes his way to his true loves: poetry and fiction... Note: More installments of an American Bookworm in Paris will air over the next few months.

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Breakdowns (Pantheon)Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! is the subtitle of this new book, and we talk about the kind of young %@&*! Art Spiegelman was...

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Senselessness, translated by Katherine Silver (New Directions)Castellanos Moya's first novel to be translated into English is a jet black tragic-comedy...

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The Last Novel (Shoemaker & Hoard)David Markson has invented his own "personal genre." His novels present collaged panoramas of the travails of art and artists—the bad reviews, the rivalries, the life-long neglect, the impoverished deaths. His juxtapositions can be comic or tragic.

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Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 (Scribner)Annie Proulx's new collection is a stew of tall tales, romantic sagebrush sagas, and genuinely affecting stories of survival on the range. * Language Advisory

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