Join us in a celebration of New Orleans music, words and people, as part of our ongoing series of readers around the world.
Reading Around the World: Sudan
Then there’s that great pleasure of browsing the shelves with no objective. Before long, a title, a name—something foreign and unknown—calls out. Several years ago, for me, the title was Season of Migration to the North. In that moment, I knew I had something. Indeed, I knew I had it, a mysterious and poetic title, as well as the name of the kind of writer I spend much of my browsing time searching for: someone from a region I know little about—in the case of Tayeb Salih (1929-2009), author of Season of Migration to the North, northern Sudan.
Reading Around the World: Brazil, still terra incognita?
When the Viennese author Stefan Zweig first travelled to Brazil in 1936, he deemed the South American country “terra incognita in the cultural sense.”
Now that we've lived with Brazil through the Olympics coverage and caught glimpses of the place and its people, we look to a variety of novels to pull us further into this diverse land.
Reading Around the World: Brazil
Reading Around the World: Lisbon
Reading Barcelona
Reading Around the World: Nepal
Reading Around the World: Syria
Literature, or The Place Where History Becomes Immortal
Literature reminds us that we should never be afraid to look at something as though we’re witnessing it for the first time, however well we think we know it. This is one reason great books offer endless company and sanctuary. Each expedition into them reveals new vistas: the book becomes more intelligent as we grow alongside it.
Reading Around the World: Catalan
"... life has so much more imagination than human beings, is never, even in the face of the most conclusive proof, predictable or definitive."
Flavia Company, The Island of Last Truth
In our latest Reading Around the World, we explore the Argentinian-born Catalan writer Flavia Company and her masterful slim novel The Island of Last Truth.
Reading Around the World: Somalia
We continue through Africa in our Reading Around the World series. This time, join us in Somalia with Nuruddin Farah and his masterful Hiding in Plain Sight.
"If the paranoid regime of Siad Barre won't allow me to return because of my writing, then my work must be worth continuing. I must write something worthy of the challenge." Nuruddin Farah
Reading Around the World: Algeria
Our series on reading around the world continues in North Africa.
“You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you; and from then on, it falls into the habit of grasping things in your place, it takes over your mouth like a lover’s voracious kiss.” Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation