KCRW's Bookworm

Alice McDermott once felt a fear that her new novel would be seen as just another of her perfect Irish American novels. Instead it leaps from the page.

Four linked novellas explore the poignant interior lives of small-town characters who are usually unseen and unknown.

Nicholson Baker, poet of small accuracies, shows us how if you assemble enough of these small accuracies, you've got a novel.

Jonathan Lethem?s latest chronicles a lost generation of Jewish socialists who lived in Queens in the mid-twentieth century.

An aristocratic Liberian woman is left bereft and exiled on a remote Aegean island during her country's second civil war?

Part memoir, part literary criticism, part self-analysis, Rebecca Solnit's latest is an inter-genre meditation on the ways our lives are orchestrated by stories.

Van Dyke Parks on his multifaceted career as a lyricist, composer, arranger, producer and instrumentalist, on the heels of his first studio album in nearly twenty years.

This garden of literary and visual delights, edited by Russ Kick, wondrously illustrates the arc of 20th century literature by over 80 graphic artists.

Mark Slouka explores passion as an alternative to irony in the creation of dramatic, lyrical prose.

Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam completes the dystopian trilogy that began with "Oryx and Crake" and "The Year of the Flood."

Cathleen Schine says that she ? and her writing ? survive by seeing the humor in her life.

Peter Orner says his poignantly distilled, often tiny short stories are attempts to "create silence on the page."

Greer on his heroine's late wish to escape the troubled 1980's, his experience inhabiting a female narrative voice and the gender traveling implicit in his latest novel.

Linda Spalding on her historical novel, the story of an abolitionist in Antebellum America forced to buy a slave, and the inherent conflicts of spirit and commerce.

The author of "Shoplifting from American Apparel" on writing his latest novel, written in meticulously careful prose.