She is part of the Swedish dynasty thrust into the tabloids when her brother's heroin addiction ended in tragedy. In a rare interview, Sigrid Rausing tells how her retreat to an impoverished village changed her life When I meet Sigrid Rausing, she has just returned to London from a short book tour to her native Sweden and is still somewhat in between worlds. The previous evening, she had been the headline...
Keith Barnham brooks no dissent in his argument for a solar-powered future but his own zeal threatens to undermine it Why have we yet to make contact with alien civilisations? Perhaps, argues Keith Barnham in The Burning Answer , it is because they have observed our exploits with nuclear fuel and "have decided earthlings are too stupid to be worth colonising". Barnham nails his colours to...
Richard Kerridge's obsession for all things jumpy and slithery makes for a compelling story of a life steeped in nature I wrote to Gerald Durrell when I was seven, asking how best I could become him. He marvellously replied, saying: feed the birds in your garden, watch out for dropped feathers and old nests, look down for beetles and up for butterflies, take a net to your local pond and dip it, get...
Huck Finn and his friend Jim float down the Mississippi through the Jim Crow South and Hurricane Katrina in a new book called The Boy in His Winter . NPR's Scott Simon talks with author Norman Lock....
Wynne's War is part western, part war novel. NPR's Scott Simon talks with author Aaron Gwyn about the book that follows a U.S. Special Forces unit on horseback through Afghanistan....
Actor Terry Crews has an NFL physique that's perfect for action films, but it's his sense of humor that's won over fans. Crews' revealing new memoir is called Manhood ....
Millions of Americans get their financial advice from high-profile pundits on talk radio and cable television. The new book Clash of the Financial Pundits looks at how they affect our investments....
Carmen Callil on a fable of technological liberation against a backdrop of war This novel will be a piece of luck for anyone with a long plane journey or beach holiday ahead. It is such a page-turner, entirely absorbing: one of those books in which the talent of the storyteller surmounts stylistic inadequacies and ultimately defies one's better judgment. Good things first: the story, which...
by Carol Ann Duffy An apple's soft thump on the grass, somewhen in this place. What was it? Beauty of Bath. What was it? Yellow, vermillion, round, big, splendid; already escaping the edge of itself, like the mantra of bees, like the notes of rosemary, tarragon, thyme. Poppies scumble their colour onto the air, now and there, here, then and again. Continue reading... ...
The bestselling American author on dentistry, insomnia, the Old Testament and staying offline Joshua Ferris 's first novel, Then We Came to the End , a satire of life in a Chicago advertising agency, was an international bestseller and announced him as an authentic voice of his generation. His third book, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour , is about to be published. He lives in New York. Your novels are...
Great US novelist insists he is quitting public life as he reflects on his many literary identities When Philip Roth told the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles in November 2012 that he was quitting the field " To tell you the truth, I'm done " there was widespread disbelief. Surely a novelist who had devoted himself as singlemindedly to his art as Roth could not be serious? Was it possible...
The New York Times made news this week when it announced Jill Abramson's departure. For a deeper understanding of the paper's history, author Kevin Roose recommends Hard News by Seth Mnookin....
A new biography by Lorna Gibb glosses over West's writing to focus on her remarkable, tumultuous 20th century life. Reviewer Michael Schaub says the book is well-researched, yet reads like a novel....
Scarlett Johansson is suing a French writer for 'exploiting her name' in his novel about a woman who looks just like her. But there's a long and (mostly) honourable tradition of putting real people in fictional works Does a person own the copyright on themselves? The actor Scarlett Johansson would like to think so. She is suing the French author Grégoire Delacourt because he has written...
Ian Sansom hails a great Czech writer who lived through fascism and communism Kafka 's The Trial ; Haek's The Good Soldier vejk ; Kundera 's The Joke ; Bohumil Hrabal 's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age ; Josef kvorecký's Lieutenant Boruvka novels: one might be forgiven for thinking that all Czech literature is somehow synonymous with absurdism, dark humour and the erotic sublime....
A new BBC drama about Dylan Thomas's final days in New York will be broadcast as part of his centenary celebrations. Does it just add to the myth? Two weeks ago a large audience of Dylan Thomas enthusiasts gathered in a marquee in Laugharne, the pretty Carmarthenshire town where Thomas spent his last years, to view a screen ing of A Poet in New York , a new TV drama about...
The Man Booker-nominated author is overwhelmed by his own tortuous plot I once had a wise old American editor who believed that the secret to becoming a great novelist lay in learning the lesson that a brilliant facility with language is beside the point. This advice was near-impossible to digest not least, as she acknowledged, because a young writer is often acclaimed precisely because of this...
Books have always been Linda Grant's friends; they made her the writer she is. So why did she decide to murder her library? I am moving house. I am moving from the spacious flat I have lived in for 19 years, a corner house, very bright and full of windows, a place of flights of stairs and landings and hallways, no room on the same level as another. There has always been space for more books,...
Also: Jonathan Safran Foer joins forces with Chipotle; two new Flowers in the Attic novels will revisit the arsenic- and incest-laced world of the Dollanganger siblings....
Our dear friend Barrie Hardymon returns to the show as we cover fairy tales and take a quiz on the distressing marketing of fall television....