We have launched our fundraising campaign on Kickstarter. We need your help to move on to PBS:
Here are some of the authors who are participating in our campaign. They will sit down with you for coffee for sure: Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, Chris Pavone, Amy Sohn, Rick Moody, Sheri Fink, Jeanine Cummings, Joan Silber, Alice Cohen, Lodro Rinzler, Allan Topol, Jackson Kaguri, Scott Turow, M J Rose, T. Jefferson Parker, Boris Fishman, George Prochnik, Kerry Zukus, Edie Meidav, Caroline Leavitt, Heather Terrell, Anne Korkeakivi, Raymond Khoury, Gwen Edelman, and the list may just get longer . . . Click on picture above to see our perks.
The Books du Jour Team
The guests of this week’s episode of Books du Jour cannot emphasize enough the importance of turf. Turf is the stuff of the locals and inherent affinity with the material. In her most recent novel, “Unseen,” crime writer, Karin Slaughter, the Georgia native, does not drift too far from her roots. She sends Will Trent on a path to wrestle with his own mind along with the natives’ and to make sense of unpleasant discoveries in the process. As always, Karin’s writing is precise and festers an intense psychological tension that could not happen anywhere else.
Henry Chang’s new Jack Yu series, “Death Money,” carries the heavy whiff of a singular place seldom visited in crime fiction. In this case, New York China Town and particularly its seedy world. “Death Money,” is a form of bribe, a tradition of burning Joss money to supply deceased with goods and funds to bribe underworld officials. Using a clairvoyant as a sidekick, Jack Yu’s delve into the mystery of the death unidentified Asian man and reveals a world both compelling and mysterious.
Though originally from Russia, Maria Konnikova has lived and traveled in many foreign places. Her book “Mastermind,” explores the many fertile fields of Sherlock Holmes’s mind, using the Sir Arthur Doyle’s famous reasoner method. Exerting neuroscience and psychology, Maria offers a guideline on how to transform yourself into the next king investigator of Baker Street. Maria promises that tou will remember better, think clearer, and improve your mental powers if you keep your mind opened.
This week’s episode of “Books Du Jour” looks at “transplant” literature. Andre Aciman, who over the years has become a specialist of squares: Abingdon Square, Strauss Park (which looks like a square) and Harvard Square, his latest novel, reflects on the voice of integration. Egyptian born, Andre shares through his novel the daily struggle he encounters to define his identity, the acceptance of other precepts and values, be they moral or ethical.
Born in Sarajevo (Bosnia), Aleksandar Hemon offers a different voice, a voice of authenticity and appropriation even in the face of the corruption of language and past. His book “The Book of My Lives” is a collection of essays tracing the last twenty years of his life, from his departure from Bosnia and the irrupting war to the present day acceptance of life’s many pluralities.
Though born and raised in the states, Joan Silber’s “Fools” is a collection of short stories, which deals with the lure of foreign countries. France in this instance, where we meet a cast of drifting American characters, who really are in search of themselves as they try to fill the existential void at the core of their journey. They are idealists who have to grapple with the failures of their beliefs, the fragility of their political choices and societies’ demands, before they can fully embrace themselves.