Books & Literature

Soviet-born journalist Masha Gessen has just edited a new collection of post-Soviet fiction by women, called "Half A Revolution." She says that most of the writers in the collection belong to the "mute generation" that came of age under Brezhnev. Gessen immigrated to the U.S. in 1981 when she was 14 to be with her parents. She's been an editor, primarily in gay and lesbian press, and was international editor at The Advocate. Gessen has since repatriated to Russia.

The British author's new book Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dreams is about the dark and the night, literally and figuratively. He examines night terrors, dreams, sleep research, fear of the dark, and "the dark night of the soul." He's also a poker enthusiast.

Pollster Stanley B. Greenberg was senior advisor to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and currently works for the Democratic National Committee. He is credited with recognizing, nearly ten years ago, the dissatisfaction among middle class voters with the two political parties. Greenberg has a new book about the historic forces that put Bill Clinton in the White House, and consequently led to 1994's midterm Republican landslide. It's called Middle Class Dreams: The Politics and Power of the New American Majority.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "The Polish Officer," a new World War II espionage novel from Alan Furst.

Clinical neurology professor and doctor Oliver Sacks is the author of six books about his patients, people with autism, Parkinson's Disease, Tourette's Syndrome, and other neurological disorders. Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams in the 1991 film version of his book "Awakenings." His other books include "A Leg to Stand On," and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." His newest is "An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales," which tells the stories of the disorders of seven of his subjects.

Rock Critic Kent Tucker reviews "Call Me Burroughs," the new collection of readings by William Burroughs.

The Canadian writer has a new novel called "The Cunning Man." It follows the life of a Toronto-based doctor during World War 2 who witnesses the death of a father at the High Altar. The Washington Post has called it "one of [the] author's most entertaining and satisfying novels." Davies, now 81, has had three successive careers -- he began as an actor, then was a journalist and newspaper publisher, and in 1981 retired as professor of the Massy college at the University of Toronto.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new book, "Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s" by Ann Douglas, a critical look at cultural figures from the jazz age.

Commentator Gerald Early reviews "The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes," edited by the poet's biographer, Arnold Rampersad.

Williams spent the first ten years of his life believing he was white in segregated Virginia, and that his dark-skinned father was Italian. When his parents' marriage ended, his father took him and his brother to Muncie, Indiana, where the boys learned that they were half black. Williams' new memoir "Life on the Color Line" is about the struggle and repression he faced growing up between the races. Publisher's Weekly calls it "(an) affecting and absorbing story."

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The Washington Post, David Maraniss. He's just completed a new biography of President Clinton, "First in His Class." In researching the book, Maraniss interviewed more than 400 people, including Clinton's friends, relatives, and colleagues. One reviewer writes, "the portrait of Mr.

Professor Nicholas Negroponte's new book "Being Digital" explores the future of new information technology and how it will challenge today's perceptions of the future. Ten years ago, Negroponte created the now famous and innovative Media Laboratory at MIT. He believes a fundamental change in how we live is coming with the newest computer technologies. He is also a popular columnist for Wired Magazine.

Commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews two new murder mysteries: the London-set "Original Sin," by P.D. James and "Cranks and Shadows" by K.C. Constantine, which takes place in post-industrial Pennsylvania.

The New Yorker called Trevor"probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language." Besides his eight volumes of short stories, he has written eleven novels, several plays for stage and for radio and television, and stories for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other magazines. Early last year he published his memoir, "Excursions in the Real World," in which he writes about his family and childhood in Ireland. His most recent novel is "Felicia's Journey."

Poet Mark Halliday reads "Separated Father," a poem about the differences between familial and romantic love.

Aciman is the author of "Out of Egypt: A Memoir." The book follows Aciman's close-knit, flamboyant Jewish family through 50 years of residence in Alexandria. The family was forced to leave Egypt when Aciman was 14, during a long wave of Anti-Semitism and Arab nationalism.

Monette died of complications from the AIDS virus on Friday, at age 49. His 1988 book "Borrowed Time: An Aids Memoir," was the first memoir to be published about AIDS, and won a National Book Award. In it, Monette told the story of his "beloved" friend and lover's two year struggle with AIDS. The book was called "a gallant, courageous love story." In 1992, he wrote a memoir about his own life before he came out of the closet at the age of 25, "Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story." (Rebroadcast)

Merrill died Monday at age 68. The son of the founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage house, Merrill traveled to Europe at age 24, a newly published poet "meaning to stay as long as possible". That was in 1950. His memoir "A Different Person" detailed his two and a half years there, and featured encounters with psychoanalysts, new and old lovers, and Alice Toklas. Merrill wrote eleven books of poems, and was the winner of two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize. (Rebroadcast)

Golden in the author of the new memoir, "Saving Our Sons." She writes about bringing up her son in Washington D.C., where homicide is the leading cause of death for Black males between 18 and 24. In the preface, she says, "I stopped work on a novel in order to write this book. The unremitting press of young lives at risk, the numbing stubbornness of annual, real-life death tolls, rendered fiction suddenly unintriguing, vaguely obscene."

Commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews "The Wedding," by Dorothy West, one of the last surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance.