Lannan Foundation

Who knows what books will look like ten years from now! While e-books and new technologies loom, poet, anthologist, and ethnopoeticist Jerome Rothenberg offers alternative ways to think about books; as sacred objects, storage machines, objects d’art.

Real Audio: A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections About the Book and Writing

Wherever Oliver Sacks goes, the nature of consciousness is his subject. Join us, then, as we discuss his botanical tour of Oaxaca, where this sensitive neurologist observed a world.

Real Audio: Oaxaca Journal

Oliver Sacks Bio and Cross Links

In an eerie and fascination first novel, a murdered girl reveals a double mystery: the nature of heaven (from where she narrates her story) and the nature of earth (where her family remembers her and her murderer remains uncaught). Alice Sebold is an L.A.-based first novelist with an unusual gift.

Real Audio: The Lovely Bones

Three young writers, eachpublishing a first book with a major press, explore the terrain of contemporary short-story writing. From personal backgrounds to their desires to break with tradition, we examine the variety of impulses that bring writers to the short story.

Real Audio: Babe in Paradise

The award-winning poet on the objects (stones, forks, dolls) that form the internal puppet theater of his imagination.

Real Audio: Jackstraws

Charles Simic Bio and Cross Links

Young Zadie Smith’s dizzying, comis take on multi-racial London. Her background, she says, was so mixed that P.G. Wodehouse’s pure-bloods seemed to her to eb foreign and “"exotic."”

Real Audio: White Teeth

Having recently returned to his native Brooklyn after a more than twenty year stint in California, Sorentino’s new books span the continent with an unrelenting experimental style and a relentless project: to dig out nuggets of accuracy from the morass of banality and clich�.

Real Audio: Little Casino; Gold Fools

Gilbert Sorrentino Bio and Cross Links

Robert Stone explores the underlying holiness of all faith—from the fanatic’s to the mystics, from the con-man’s to the addicts’s—in his new novel about the Holy Land.

Real Audio: Damascus Gate

We defy you not to laugh when you hear these poems from the previously sepulchral laureate Mark Strand. A new magical and hilarious direction for this gloomy Gus.

Real Audio: Chicken, Shadow, Moon and More

Mark Strand Bio and Cross Links

In his first novel, Manil Suri reenacts the Bhagavad-Gita in modern Bombay. In our conversation, we discuss the power of spiritual enlightenment in the materialistic world of his novel.

Real Audio: The Death of Vishnu