News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
October 2005
Desperately Seeking Sister, Swede Picks Up Speed A Genealogical Guessing Game A bevy of menacing women is tearing through the list in Argentina as Marisa Grinstein profiles fourteen femmes fatales who lay to waste the stereotype of the prim and proper lady in LadyKillers. Cheated out of their destiny and left bitter with baggage, each [...]
{ 0 comments }
November 2004
Russian Expose on Female Bombers, Germany’s 99-Euro Bestseller, and A Real Gouda Story from Holland There certainly was no shortage of politically charged books at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, and one of the most startling of all was penned by a 23-year-old Russian journalist Yulia Yuzik, who surveys the growing number of female [...]
{ 0 comments }
October 2004
Italians Battle Reclusive Tenants, Food Taster Plays With Fire, Tony Soprano Takes Normandy Like an episode of House Hunters gone terribly awry, the latest offering of Italy’s Andrea De Carlo, Wind Shear, sets two well-acquainted couples (along with their trusty real estate agent) off from Milan to visit some country houses which they hope to [...]
{ 0 comments }
August 2004
German Media Guru Kicks Off Literacy Campaign With a Little Help From Friends With many of our overseas contacts on summer holiday, we thought we’d bring you a special report from Germany, where the Oprah-esque German media guru Elke Heidenreich is pulling out all the stops in her latest and most far-reaching attempt to get [...]
{ 0 comments }
June 2004
Iraqi Exile in Denmark, Czech Band Beats Persecution, Chinese Memoir Smuggled to France Defining the immigrant experience is about as easy as finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, yet a former Iraqi citizen now living in Denmark has penned her contribution to this genre with a “quiet, sad and nevertheless unsentimental portrayal of [her] [...]
{ 0 comments }
March 2004
Frenzy in Finland Book Babes on the Baltic, Italy’s Newsstand Novellas, And Germany’s Aesopian Menagerie Having budged out of their Barcaloungers, reader-citizens are barging into bookshops all across Finland, where surveys reveal that the number of Finns who regularly read and buy books is climbing — 14% of those surveyed bought more than 10 books [...]
{ 0 comments }
August 2003
He Who Laughs Last Fontanarrosa Grabs Guffaws, Shades of Scorsese in Italy, And Germany’s Answer to Oprah Pull up a barstool and lend an ear to the simply Seinfeldian comic strip artist and author Roberto Fontanarrosa, whose latest book, You’ll Never Believe Me, is stirring up all manner of giggles and guffaws in Argentina this [...]
{ 0 comments }
November 2002
A Royal Pain Love Child in Denmark, Going Postal in Greece, and Sweden’s John le Carré Don’t look now, Fergie, but there’s a new royal nuisance in town: Behold the saucy, 18th-century Danish princess Louise Augusta, whose mug may not have been plastered on the cover of The Sun in her day, but who’s knocking [...]
{ 0 comments }
November 2000
Beat the Devil Coelho Back in Brazil, Mortier in the Netherlands, And Pleijel Shakes Up Sweden Brazilian high priest of letters Paulo Coelho has conjured up The Devil and Miss Prym after two years of soul searching, and the result is a half-million-copy catechism that’s been deemed a “parable in which the characters show all [...]
{ 0 comments }
