Natsuo Kirino is one of Japan's best known writers. We sample an excerpt from her psychological thriller, Real World.
Natsuo Kirino is one of Japan's best known writers. We sample an excerpt from her psychological thriller, Real World.
Mr. Cutlets loves meat. He rhapsodizes about pork chops and his favorite steaks with Jim Fleming.
Matthew Klamm, Thisbe Nissen, and Emma Richler talk with Steve Paulson about the lives of young writers and how their attitudes differ from those of their parents’ generation.
If there was an environmental Hall of Fame, Gus Speth would be a charter member. The former dean of the Yale School of Forestry, he's the founder of the World Resources Institute and cofounder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He says we need get past our fixation on economic growth if we want to curb global warming.
John Van de Ruit is an actor, writer, and producer who lives in South Africa and has created a phenomenon with his novels "Spud" and its sequel "Spud: The Madness Continues."
Over the last year or so, Russell Brand has increasingly used his celebrity status to advocate for changing our political systems. His new, best-selling book puts these ideas on paper, drawing on political theorists and his own personal experiences to reimagine society itself.
If there’s one writer who’s identified with the Mississippi River, it’s Mark Twain. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri — on the river’s edge — and as a young man, he worked as a steamboat pilot. And then he wrote the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the novel that turned the Mississippi into myth. But it also created one of the most enduring controversies in American literary history: how to depict race relations in America's past. In this interview, Andrew Levy says that "Huckleberry Finn" is actually anti-racist — and when it was first published, the big controversy was about Twain’s depiction of wild children.
Harriet Tubman will soon be gracing our twenty dollar bill. Most of us know only one image of her. It's an iconic image taken later in her life in which her hair's covered in a dark cloth and she has a stern expression. But there are other images of Harriet Tubman as well, including a wood cut of her carrying a musket.
Law professor Nicholas Johnson says the image of Harriet Tubman carrying a rifle doesn’t fit with how most Americans view abolitionists and civil rights leaders. After all, weren’t they supposed to be peaceful? But as Johnson tells Steve Paulson, there's a rich tradition of Black Americans owning guns for self-defense.