Author Frank McCourt published his first book in his sixties. The successful “Angela’s Ashes” portrayed the slums of Limerick, Ireland and became controversial in Ireland.
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Eileen Battersby’s article on Frank McCourt in The Irish Times
It may be summer, but your brain needn’t go on vacation. My summer list of fiction in translation that demands and repays close attention.
Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks gets picks for summer reading from The World’s book critic, Christopher Merrill.
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It’s summer, so we’ve asked The World’s book critic Chris Merril for some good beach reads – or for those of us in parts of the country that are totally water logged, good rainy day reads. Chris never fails to connect us with good books from all over the globe – read his recommendations here.
In the Geo Quiz, we were looking for the name and author of a book set ‘in the naked desert, under the indifferent heavens.’ The book is The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph, and the author is T.E. Lawrence, The answers come by way of bookseller David Delvecchio. Listen
Jose Manuel Prieto’s “Rex” is an adventure through time: not historical time, or physical time, so much as literary time, the dreamy, static continuum of impressions and formulations recorded across centuries and civilizations.
All great anti-utopian novels focus on a disturbing aspect of the present, pushing it to its most horrific conclusions. In “1984,” it’s the panoptic police state. In “Brave New World,” the sexualization and Americanization of England. In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the subjugation of women through the sanctification of childbirth. In Ninni Holmqvist’s “The Unit,” the issue in question is the way the childless, especially the childless elderly, are looked down upon as irrelevant.
Host Marco Werman reports on this year’s winner of Australia’s top literary prize. It’s called “Breath” by Tim Winton, and it’s a rarity, a world class novel about surfing. Listen
