Books
The Larsson inheritance
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The family of Swedish crime author Stieg Larsson, who died before his “Millennium” trilogy became a global bestseller, has offered Larsson’s partner a settlement to end a dispute over his inheritance, the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet has reported. The “Millennium” trilogy has become a worldwide phenomenon. The World’s Carol Zall reports on the latest chapter in the Larsson saga.
Sisters in War
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A new book profiles an Iraqi family’s experience of the war in Iraq, from their great optimism in 2003 to the despair and horror of the civil war years. Anchor Katy Clark talks with author, Christina Asquith, who shared their lives in Baghdad for many years. Download MP3Listen to Zia and Nunu and how they feel about the war, and America:
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World Books: Herta Müller, Memory, and the Nobel
Now that the predictable “who is she?” brouhaha over this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature has ended, it is time to explore the artistry of Herta Müller, whose books consistently denounce the corruption of language and memory, often by reworking her own past experiences in innovative, lyrical, and evocative prose.
World Books Interview: Homage to “The Halfway House”
An interview with Cuban writer José Manuel Prieto about the English translation of the late Guillermo Rosales’s “The Halfway House,” a powerful novel about exile, revolution, and mental illness.
World Books Review: A Chic “Celestina”
Written in the fifteenth century, “Celestina” remains a classic work of Spanish literature that, in a lively new English version by the acclaimed translator Margaret Sayers Peden, proffers all the sex, drama, and violence necessary for an HBO mini-series.
World Books Review: Chased out of Paradise
Paula Jacques’s “Light of My Eye” is a heart-wrenching novel about the dissolution of Egyptian Jewish life, the tale of a people displaced ten years after World War II.
World Books Review: Crime and Punishment “As God Commands”
Niccolò Ammaniti, the internationally best-selling author of “I’m Not Scared,” comes up with another compelling tale of gritty crime and desperate punishment, this time revolving around a father and son facing a variety of demons.
‘Blood Safari’
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Marco Werman talks with our book critic Christopher Merrill about a new novel called “Blood Safari” from South African writer Deon Meyer. Download MP3
World Books Podcast: Beautiful Genius
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Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) looked like a movie star and wrote like James Joyce. Lispector’s face is on postage stamps in Latin America, but her fiction is not as well known around the world. Benjamin Moser wants to change that with his new biography of Lispector, “Why This World.” He argues that Lispector’s Jewishness, along with her concern with the inner world of her characters rather than their politics, has stood in the way of her international reputation. World Books editor Bill Marx talks to Moser about how Lispector’s life influenced her writing, whether she was a magic realist, and why she should be read today. Download MP3
World Books Review: A Crown of Thorns for Mandelstam
“The Stalin Epigram” is offered as a novelist’s homage to Osip Mandelstam, the poet who embodied both a new era in Russian poetry and the martyrdom of Russia’s intelligentsia under Stalinism. But the book turns out to be a crown of thorns, a posthumous offense to a poet who has few defenders at the ready to fence for his honor.
World Books Review: Of Violence and Beauty
Colombian author Evelio Rosero has been writing about the miseries of his homeland for three decades now. His novels, many of which take on the internecine wars, kidnappings, murders, and political upheavals of his country, have won numerous awards (including, humorously enough, the National Literature Prize from the Colombian Ministry of Culture). His work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and “The Armies,” which won 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is no exception.
‘Misery literature’ for kids
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Children’s books are too depressing and don’t offer kids any hope, says Britain’s former children’s laureate Anne Fine. The BBC’s Mark Coles reports on the rise of so-called ‘misery literature’ for children, books that depict real-life tragedy, including events such as the Iraq war. Download MP3
World Books Interview: Death and the Beauty Salon
Mexican writer Mario Bellatín’s growing international literary reputation as a leading Spanish-language experimentalist suggests that he’s a pop innovator focused on the grotesque, playfully obsessed with the consciousness of the outcast.
World Books Review: I Want to be a Showbiz Solipsist
Veteran Brazilian writer Ignácio de Loyola Brandão expertly lampoons the vapidity of celebrity culture, the tyranny of the photo-op, in his latest novel.
World Books Review: Confronting Zimbabwe
“An Elegy for Easterly” is a vibrant collection of stories that artfully combines humor and horror in its depiction of the struggle to survive in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
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