Story Archives of 'Fiction'

Adam Walker is a 20 year-old undergrad at Columbia University who’s greatest ambitions are to become a poet and avoid the draft. It’s 1967. Walker’s literary ambitions are derailed shortly after meeting a visiting professor from Paris and his alluring girlfriend. Then things go terribly wrong.

A murder, revenge, growing obsessions and madness, and even the taboo subject of incest -- or maybe not. It’s difficult to tell what really happens since Adam is the protagonist of Invisible, a new novel by Paul Auster, which comes out today.

Auster has shown himself to be a master of literary illusions.

Invisible picks up on themes running through previous works like he New York Trilogy, Leviathan and Moon Palace. Invisible walks the thin lines between authorship and truth; imagination and memory.

Paul Auster joins us now from his home in Brooklyn.

As the author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and The March, E.L. Doctorow is considered one of America's preeminent writers. On Wednesday, Doctorow stopped by the Music Hall in Portsmouth for the next installment of Writers on a New England Stage. He discussed his new novel, Homer and Langley, and his career with NHPR's Laura Knoy.

Paul Chowder is stuck. He’s a mid-level poet. His girlfriend, Roz, has left him. He has a penchant for distraction and a deep mistrust of iambic pentameter, and he just can’t get his flitting mind to settle down to write the introduction to a new anthology of ryhming verse.

Paul Chowder is the hapless but beguiling narrator of The Anthologist, the new novel by Nicholson Baker. Baker has written about phone sex, presidential asassination and John Updike, with almost obsessive minuteness. Human Smoke, a non-fiction book published last year, was controversial for implicating FDR and Churchill in the devastating death toll of World War II. Now, he turns his eye to the meter and rhyme and guts of poetry, and comes away with a sharply funny satire of literary grandiosity.

We're pleased to have Nicholson Baker here with us in the studio to discuss language, langour and what lingers in the mind of The Anthologist.

You can also see Nicholson Baker read from his new work at Gibson's Books in Concord today at 1 pm, and at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth at 7 pm tonight.

The section of the bookstore devoted to the craft of writing can be a lonely place, visited mainly by struggling young authors looking for a leg up. Many instructive volumes come in and many go unnoticed. Not so for How Fiction Works by literary critic James Wood.

The book was a publishing event when it was released last year -- a testament to his prominent place in literature. Before joining The New Yorker as staff writer and critic in 2007, Wood reviewed books for The New Republic and London's Guardian newspaper. He is now visiting professor of literary criticism at Harvard University.

How Fiction Works is a love letter to the novel, a heartfelt appreciation that is part study and part instruction manual. The book plumbs four centuries of the novel, from Cervantes to Updike, analyzing voice, detail, scene, dialogue, character, consciousness and the creativity required to breathe life into static creations.

James Wood will be reading at River Run bookstore in Portsmouth tonight. But first, he graciously agreed to join us on Word of Mouth.

From time to time, we ask bloggers to point us to new writers, films, bands, or websites to check out. Today we check in with David Gutowski, author of the blog Largehearted Boy. David posts free, legal daily downloads of mp3’s, music playlists compiled by writers, and he scours the web for interviews with authors and musicians. We asked him to join us for his tips on worthwhile reads and tunes, and he joins us from his home in Birmingham, Alabama.

Largehearted Boy: Book Notes - Frank Portman, formerly of Mr. T and the Experience

Largehearted Boy: Book Notes - Victor LaValle

Largehearted Boy: Japandroids

Largehearted Boy: Noah and the Whale