KCRW's Bookworm

Adam Fitzgerald's poetry in George Washington: Poems comes across as playful while exploring the concept of Americana and what that means. 

Krys Lee's first novel dramatizes boundaries and borders – not just political ones but those that complicate human relationships.  

A married couple wind up in a wasteland of foreclosed houses and abandoned homes.

Tom McCarthy's Satin Island features a protagonist who, as his company's corporate anthropologist, has been given the enormous task of compiling a report summing up the modern era.

In his travels to more than 100 countries – some dangerous, some surprisingly not – Tom Lutz finds that the more places he goes, the more the world leaves him a little bit lost.

Neither a novel nor a collection of stories, the "fictions" in She  weave together a composite view of Los Angeles.  

A tale of the ordinary, everyday quest for contentedness -- written entirely in heroic couplets.

Vivian Gornick's memoir The Odd Woman and the City takes us on a tour of a life that is lived by walking, observing and talking. Gornick keeps her eyes open, and does she ever have a mouth on her!

Paradoxically, Geoff Dyer begins his attempt to locate America by first traveling to Tahiti. There, he discovers that Gauguin’s vision of it no longer exists – if it ever really did. Can he find the soul of America in its landscapes?

In part two of this conversation about LaRose – Louise Erdrich's novel about an act of restorative justice that tests the boundaries between two families – the discussion explores the non-linear form the novel moves in towards seeking balance and resolution.

In Louise Erdrich's LaRose, a terrible tragedy forces two families to resort to a form of traditional "restorative justice" in which one son must be given to replace the loss of another. Erdrich talks about this act as an attempt at restoring balance in a tight knit community where healing can take generations.

Joyce Carol Oates raises questions about memory – ethics, what it means to love, identity, and the ability to engage, and takes us on a trip down memory lane with a reading from a previous memoir recounting her favorite bad-for-you childhood foods. 

A. Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius is the biography of Maxwell Perkins, a long time Scribner editor who worked with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. 

Despite 20 years of study, John D'Agata believes that we're still in the "Wild West" of coming to terms with the essay, its long heritage and its creation.

Greenwell's first novel examines the relationship between an American teacher in Bulgaria with a male prostitute.