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Books
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.
World Books Review: The Birth of Infinity
The contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math, the nature of infinity, inspired this intriguing book. The French school chased rationalist solutions, while the Russian mathematicians were reportedly inspired by mystical insights attained through their religious practice, visions into the infinite that led to the founding of descriptive set theory.
Patua scroll book
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Five years ago, one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded occurred off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh Province. The quake triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean with waves up to a hundred feet tall. More than a quarter of a million people died, most of them in Indonesia. India was also hit. Now a publishing company based in the Southern city of Chennai is remembering what happened five years ago with a beautiful new handmade book. We speak with the founder and director of Tara Books. Download MP3
World Books Review: American Writers in Istanbul
“American Writers in Istanbul” should have been a fascinating example of multicultural literary analysis, but academic jargon and heavy-handed politicizing get in the way.
World Books Podcast: Pornografia Redux
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Hailed by Milan Kundera as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, Polish novelist and playwright Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) has not garnered the readership in English he deserves. That may change with the efforts of Danuta Borchardt, who has translated three of Gombrowicz’s novels. Her latest translation is of his 1966 novel “Pornografia.” (She won a National Translation Award for her version of “Ferdydurke,” Gombrowicz’s classic black comedy about the virtues of immaturity.) World Books editor Bill Marx talks to Borchardt about the erotic gamesmanship in “Pornografia,” the hazards of translating from the Polish, and why she decided to translate Gombrowicz in the first place.
World Books Review: The Creative Mystery of Clarice Lispector
In his superb biography, Benjamin Moser has done an amazing amount of research on the life of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, particularly on how powerfully her Jewish background influenced her fiction, so that the enigmatic writer emerges as a complete yet complex figure.
World Books Interview: Spreading the Word about European Fiction
An interview with Aleksander Hemon, editor of “Best European Fiction 2010,” the inaugural volume in an annual series dedicated to international writing. He believes that European short story writers are “not afraid of intellectually engaging the reader, of making the reader work.”
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