Books
World Books Podcast: 100th anniversary of the death of Mark Twain
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April 21st marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Mark Twain, an American icon who made an indelible impression on the world before and after his demise. The Library of America has published two volumes that remind us of Twain’s influence on other countries. One is a collection of Twain’s travel writing, featuring “A Tramp Abroad,” “Following the Equator,” and uncollected pieces. The press is also publishing “The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works,” which contains a selection of international responses to Twain, visual as well as literary. World Books editor Bill Marx spoke to the editor of the latter volume, Stanford University professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, about Twain’s impressions of the world and the world’s impressions of Twain.World Books Review: ‘The Original of Laura”
The striking feature of Dmitri Nabokov’s edition of his father’s final unfinished novel is the wresting of authorial control, by a son, from a man whose deep obsession with control was manifest throughout his literary career.
World Books Review: Memorable ‘Ghosts of Home’
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s monumental book “Ghosts of Home” is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search, a compelling historical reconstruction of the German-Jewish Central European culture of the embattled city of Czernowitz, once known as the “Vienna of the East.”
World Books Review: ‘The Changeling’
At its best, the Japanese Nobel Laureate’s latest novel dwells on the odd intricacy of a long-running traumatized relationship, which is equal parts love, jealousy, and sexual tension.
World Books Interview: The Films of Robert Bresson
For director Martin Scorsese and others, French film director Robert Bresson is “one of the cinema’s greatest artists.” Oxford University Press has just published the first comprehensive volume in English that celebrates and analyzes Bresson’s challenging genius.
Swearing in Irish, storytelling in Scots, rapping in Khmer
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Two takes on the Irish language: one from Patrick’s dad, who was a schoolboy in the early years of Ireland’s independence, when studying Irish was an exercise in nation-building. Then, an interview with Manchan Magan who made a TV series about traveling around Ireland speaking only Irish. Next, we hear from Alexander McCall Smith: his latest offering in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is a children’s book in the Scots language. Finally, hip-hop artist Boomer Da Sharpshooter who grew up speaking English but now raps in Cambodia’s main language, Khmer. Download MP3
World Books Review: African ‘Dreams in a Time of War’
A compelling African memoir whose unblinking candor about human behavior suggests the iconoclastic, unsentimental approach of such authors as Czesław Miłosz and I.B. Singer, writers whose recreation of a vanished world is tough-minded rather than sentimental.
Drawing the Ramayana
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Animator Sanjay Patel worked on The Simpsons, A Bugs Life and The Incredibles. As a child, his home was filled with Hindu icons and stories … including one Hindu tale filled with powerful deities, love-struck monsters and a flying monkey god. His new book, Ramayana: Divine Loophole, brings a modern look to this ancient Hindu story. Marco Werman speaks with Sanjay Patel. Download MP3
World Books Review: An Urgent “February”
Canadian writer Lisa Moore’s second novel, a harrowing tale of loss, solidifies her reputation as a gifted writer whose prose exhibits an urgency, precision, and sensitivity worthy of the legacy of Virginia Woolf.
Henning Mankell
Today’s Geo Quiz is also a matter of international intrigue. Your first clue to unravelling this mystery is the name “Henning Mankell.” He’s a well-known crime novelist from Sweden. You may know his mysteries featuring Inspector Kurt Wallander. We’re looking for the author’s hometown. Henning Mankell says it’s a small village — dwarfed by its surroundings.
World Books Review: The Hypnotic Monsieur Pain
Set against the background of the Spanish Civil War, Roberto Bolaño’s 1999 suspense novel is one of those rare page turners you won’t want to put down, even after you figure out that essential pieces to the puzzle are missing.
World Books Podcast: Of Naked Maidens and Sea Serpents
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The Italian Renaissance epic “Orlando Furioso,” was once a hot volume, at least among the literati, such as Shakespeare, and musicians, such as Scarlotti and Haydn. But Ludovico Ariosto’s long tale of knights and monsters duking it out largely dropped off the radar screen in the 20th century, though it was Italo Calvino’s favorite work of literature. Translator David R. Slavitt wants to rectify that with his English translation of the poem, the first in 30 years. World Books Editor Bill Marx talks to Slavitt, a veteran translator of over eighty volumes of poetry and fiction, about how his playful version reflects the giggly, surrealist mischievousness of the original. Download MP3
World Books Review: Diary of Some Bad Years
One of literature’s greatest living authors, J. M. Coetzee, writes his own posthumous fictionalized biography, in which he airs his deepest fears that no number of awards or marriages or friends can ever fully dispel the universal human certitude that one is a talentless fraud and an unlovable misanthrope.
World Books Review: Perils of the Pansexual
This novel about a young woman who wakes up to find that her big toe has become a penis was a major bestseller in Japan, and it’s easy to see why. The book is titillating, disturbing without being disgusting, and reads like a self-help guide on the subjects of sex and love.
World Books Review: The Brilliance of Ordinary Lives
Perhaps this latest, and possibly last book, from the amazing Czech writer Joseph Skvorecky will make the Nobel prize committee take notice of an author who proffers the wisdom that comes with living long enough to sort out so many of the mysteries which plague us when we are young.
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