Shakespeare may have opined “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” but it is the steady slew of crime-fiction writers who hail from the region that should be credited with doing a bang-up job of keeping the sentiment alive and well. By far the most popular genre in Scandinavia, psychological thrillers and suspense-filled novels…Continue Reading
International buzz is building over Mizé, the Portuguese novel by Ricardo Adolfo that appeared last year from Dom Quixote. Berlin Verlag recently nabbed German rights and in a hush hush deal, film rights were just sold to a major film company, so far nameless. Rumor has it the location will be changed from Lisbon to…Continue Reading
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
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…Continue Reading
Cuckoo Cavaliers Three Pests in Gavron’s Mess, Down and Out in Gdansk, And Gala Rings Twice in Spain John Belushi meets the Coen brothers — or maybe the three stooges — this month as a trio of young Israelis land in New York to strike it fabulously rich but soon put the pedal to the…Continue Reading
It’s a Wonderful Double Life Hot-Buttered in Finland, Dreyfus Redux in Israel, and Watusi on the Brain in Spain Nouveau-riche restaurateur Brede Ziegler is murdered not once, but twice in No Echo, the sixth in a series of shrewdly executed detective novels from megastar Norwegian author Anne Holt. After Ziegler turns up hot-buttered and trussed,…Continue Reading
Every publishing career follows a narrative arc. For some, it’s the Proustian ebb of Swann’s Way. For others, it’s Finnegans Wake. And the most gripping career stories tend to be those that jump out of the genre altogether. As conversations with a dozen book-world veterans show, life after publishing does exist, and what’s more, there’s…Continue Reading
