Books & Literature

Novelist Alice Sebold. She's the author of the new book, The Lovely Bones which was reviewed last week on Fresh Air. She's also the author of the memoir, Lucky.

We remember the poet Kenneth Koch, who died Saturday.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Lovely Bones, a debut novel by Alice Sebold.

Writer Gary Shteyngart. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, is receiving critical acclaim. The main character of the book, like Shteyngart, is a Russian-American Jew who emigrated to the United States as a child. In a New York Times Magazine cover article, Daniel Zalewski wrote, "Gary Shteyngart has rewritten the classic immigrant narrative — starring a sarcastic slacker instead of a grateful striver. And after all his parents have done for him!"

Writer James Gavin has produced Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker. It's a biography of the jazz trumpeter and vocalist. Baker came from Oklahoma in the 1950s to become the "prince of cool jazz" on the West Coast. His death in Amsterdam in 1988 seems to have been drug-related. Gavin provides some answers to the riddle of his death. Gavin is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and other publications.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Interesting Women, the new collection of short stories by Andrea Lee.

Boxer Laila Ali. Shes the only one of heavyweight champ Mohammed Alis nine children to choose a life in the ring. Her recent bout with Jacqui Frazier was the most highly publicized female boxing event ever. Shes written an autobiography called REACH! Finding Strength, Spirit and Personal Power.

She died on June 14 2002, at age 65, from breast cancer. She was one of the most widely published African-American writers. In her poems and political essays, she addressed issues of racism, oppression and dispossession. She was born in Harlem and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. She taught English at the University of California at Berkeley.

Writer Michael Pollan. His book, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World takes a look at four plants cultivated by humans: the apple, the tulip, potatoes and marijuana. Pollan demonstrates that plants and humans have developed a reciprocal, co-evolutionary relationship: do we plant potatoes, or do potatoes seduce us into planting them? Pollan questions the assumption that we are in charge of our agriculture. The book is now in paperback.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Emperor of Ocean Park (Knopf) by Stephen L. Carter.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Dive From the Clausens Pier (knopf) the debut novel by Ann Packer.

Writer Noelle Howey has written a new memoir about growing up in a household where as she was coming of age, her father was coming out as a trans-sexual and her mother was coming into her own as an independent woman. Her new book is Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods-My Mother's, My Father's and Mine (Picador). Howey is coeditor of Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents. She received a 2001 Nonfiction Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Advertising great Mary Wells Lawrence. Her career spans the 1960s to the 1980s, and she created many memorable campaigns. She is responsible for the Alka-Selzer "Plop Plop Fizz Fizz," and the slogan, "I Love New York." Her new book is called A Big Life (in Advertising) (Knopf). She is a member of the Advertising Hall of Fame and the Copywriters Hall of Fame.

Writer Nick Hornby's novel, About a Boy, has been made into a film starring Hugh Grant and Toni Collette. It opens Friday, May 17. Hornby also wrote the novel High Fidelity, which became a hit film of the same name starring John Cusack. This interview first aired Sept. 26, 1995.

Sherpa Jamling Tenzing Norgay was Climbing Leader for the 1996 Everest IMAX Filming Expedition and summitted the Mountain that year. He's also the son of Tenzing Norgay, one of the first men in history to summit Mt. Everest. In his book, Touching My Father's Soul, Jamling Norgay recounts his 1996 Mt. Everest ascent: the climb and its familial meaning. He now heads Tenzing Norgay Adventures, which is based in India. This interview originally aired April 19, 2001.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the debut novel Everything is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin) by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Maria Rosa Menocal is a R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She is also the author of the new book: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown). Menocal details Andalucia, Spain from 786 to 1492 where literature, science, and tolerance flourished.

Writer Alec Wilkinson is the author of new memoir, My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell (Houghton Mifflin) about his relationship with writer and editor William Maxwell. Maxwell was fiction editor for the New Yorker from 1936-1976 and worked with such authors as J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty and scores of others. Maxwell was the author of a number of novels, including Time Will Darken It, and So Long, See You Tomorrow, as well as several short story collections. He died at the age of 91 in August 2000.

Novelist Rick Moody is the author of The Ice Storm which was made into a film, and the short story collection Demonology. He calls his new book, The Black Veil, a "sort of non-fiction novel." It parallels Moody's investigation of his own family's history of depression. He found that one of his ancestors — a clergyman — was the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Minister's Black Veil."