Back by popular demand, Australia’s second annual Books Alive promotion — a two-week, federally-funded, book-buying bonanza — kicked off last month as Australian Minister for the Arts and Sport Rod Kemp officially pronounced the campaign’s motto: “lose yourself in a book and find yourself in a bookstore.” During the two week period ending August 15,…Continue Reading
The Flying Dutchmen De Winter Does Hollywood, Holland’s Huck Finn, And Bar Chickens Cluck in Spain Hailed as the Dutch-European postwar generation’s answer to John Irving, the popular Netherlands writer Leon de Winter has scored that mega-coup all scribblers secretly dream about: his own film starring Burt Reynolds. Cued up for its theatrical première in…Continue Reading
Blowin’ in the Wind Grandes Gusts in Spain, Bewitchery in Greece, And Crazy Birds Flutter Aloft in Israel Breezes, gales, gusts, and tempests swirl like suspicious characters through this month’s bestselling Spanish novel Difficult Airs, the latest effort from well-known erotica queen Almudena Grandes. The author’s fifth novel sets out to map the meaning of…Continue Reading
The Waiting Game Lovelorn Levy in France, Qashu’s Israeli Arabs, And Poland’s Own Bridget Jones French architect-cum-literary-phenom Marc Levy hits the charts in both France and Italy with his second novel, Will You Be There?, a “treat of simplicity and emotion” that delves into the rendez-vous manqués between lovelorn Americans Philip and Susan, after the…Continue Reading
The Darnedest Things Swedish Kid-Savants, Greece’s Sippable Fiction, And Pilch Toasts All of Holland A wave of mourning sweeps over Sweden this month with the passing of Astrid Lindgren, mother of Pippi Longstocking, though her spirit lives on in the mischievous Swedish bestseller of the moment, Old Ladies Don’t Lay Eggs. This zinger of a…Continue Reading
Wine Dark Seas Aegean Fables, France Between the Sheets, and Sweden Says ‘Pippi, Move Over’ A veritable odyssey of titles appears this month on the bestseller list from Greece, at the top of which is The Three Widows by Dora Yiannakopoulou, which traces the lives and friendships of three women who become friends after the…Continue Reading
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…Continue Reading
