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British journalist and author Justine Hardy has spent the last 20 years writing about Kashmir, a country of astonishing natural beauty caught in a violent territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. “In the Valley of Mist: One Family in a Changing World” looks at how a real-life middle-class Kashmiri family, the Dars, deal with their country’s turmoil and prejudices. World Books editor Bill Marx talks to Hardy about what she calls “Jihad Inc,” the responsibilities of storytelling in a troubled region, and the current state of life in Kashmir.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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.
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