Claire Messud's cosmopolitan sensibilities infuse her fiction with a refreshing cultural fluidity. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady (1995), followed two midlife sisters in search of new beginnings, one in Bali and the other on the Isle of Skye. In her second novel, The Last Life (1999), a teenager reacting to a family crisis pondered her father's origins in Algeria and southern France, and her mother's New England roots.
The year is 1839, and two great empires — Great Britain and Russia — are treating the world map like a chessboard, trying to outmaneuver one another for territory. For no reason other than geography, Afghanistan gets caught in the middle.
Today, as the U.S. ends its war in Afghanistan, historian William Dalrymple recounts the first time a Western power fought in that country. In Return of a King, Dalrymple details Great Britain's attempt to control Afghanistan by putting an ousted king back on the throne — a plan that went famously wrong.
The role of the Leading Player (Patina Miller) becomes a kind of circus ringmaster in the new Broadway revival of Stephen Schwartz's 1972 musical Pippin.
Credit Joan Marcus
The medieval king Charles (Terrence Mann) is far too busy ruling to spend time with his easily distracted son Pippin (Matthew James Thomas).
When Pippin opened in 1972, it was a sensation. Directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, who was coming off his Academy Award-winning film version of Cabaret, it was a showbiz triumph of jazz hands, sexy dancing and theatrical magic.
Originally published on Wed April 24, 2013 12:58 pm
Like many poets, Charles Simic has a day job, teaching in the English Department at the University of New Hampshire. The Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate has traveled the road for over 50 years — giving hundreds of readings at schools, book stores, jazz clubs and abandoned malls.
David Sedaris' stories have appeared on This American Life and in The New Yorker, and have now filled seven essay collections -- most recently, Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls.
Credit iStockphoto.com
David Sedaris's new book is called Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls.
David Sedaris writes personal stories, funny tales about his life growing up in a Greek family outside of Raleigh, N.C., about working as an elf in Santa's workshop at Christmastime, and about living abroad with his longtime partner, Hugh.
Equilateral is a weird little novel, but any reader familiar with Ken Kalfus expects his writing to go off-road. Kalfus wrote one of the best and certainly the least sentimental novels about New York City post-9/11. I loved A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, but I stopped assigning it to students in my New York lit class because they were usually turned off by its black humor and lack of uplift. Equilateral doesn't run that same risk of being in bad taste as social commentary because, at first, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with current events.
U.S. Army Spc. Adam Winfield is the subject of the documentary The Kill Team, which focuses on his ongoing legal struggles after being accused of the premeditated murder of an unarmed Afghan in 2010.
Writer Joel Arnold is surveying the scene at the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs in New York City through April 28. He'll be filing occasional dispatches for Monkey See.
At Tribeca over the weekend, I was initially reluctant to seek out The Kill Team, a documentary focused on American soldiers charged in the 2010 murders of three Afghan civilians — this, after a week when senseless violence felt especially close to home.
Tell Me More celebrates National Poetry Month by hearing poetic tweets from listeners for the 'Muses and Metaphor' series. Today's poem comes from Roberta Beary. She tweets about her mother's loving gestures toward her father — even after his death.
At 19, Maya Vidal, the California-born heroine of Isabel Allende's florid, frenzied and intermittently entertaining novel Maya's Notebook, has already busted out of a wilderness academy for troubled teens in Oregon, been raped and beaten by a trucker, worked as a girl Friday for a drug dealer/counterfeiter and done some $10 hooking in Las Vegas.
Coffee is a powerful beverage. On a personal level, it helps keep us awake and active. On a much broader level, it has helped shape our history and continues to shape our culture.
Spring's little green garden peas were nearly done in by the tin can. Their unfortunate incarceration rendered them drab, mush and bleak. They tasted of the tinny can, if anything at all. Brilliant, beautiful, garden peas deserve better.
Earlier this month, Morning Edition launched a new food project called Cook Your Cupboard, inspired by a dilemma many of us have faced before: a mysterious food item in the pantry, bought for an unusual recipe or on a whim, that we simply don't know what to do with. Morning Edition asked listeners to send photos of their baffling ingredients to npr.org/cupboard, where home cooks gave each other many creative recipe suggestions.
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google (third from left), and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (second from right) watch as a North Korean student surfs the Internet. Schmidt and Richardson visited this computer lab during a tour of Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, North Korea, in January.
Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen — coauthors of a new book, The New Digital Age — recently returned from a highly publicized trip to North Korea. In the second part of their conversation with NPR's Audie Cornish, they discuss the role of the Internet in more repressive countries.
