Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

With the current global release of the film of Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s much garlanded novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, another chance to hear the writer talking about his tense and provocative thriller.

Through the eyes of the young, worldly-wise Pakistani, Changez, in conversation with a mysterious American stranger in a café in Lahore, this brief, gripping novel tells of a love affair with America that goes dangerously wrong and tackles the ever more relevant and complex issues of Islamic fundamentalism and America’s ‘war on terror’ with sympathy and balance.

So, go see the film, or better still read the book – and then tune in to World Book Club with Mohsin Hamid and Harriett Gilbert, to see what readers around the world made of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

(Image: Mohsin Hamid, author)

The suspension of the so-called “Indian Wars” did not signal colonialism’s end, only a different battlefield. “The calvary man was supplanted–or, rather, supplemented–by the field matron, the Hotchkiss by the transit, and the prison by the school,” writes Beth H. Piatote. “A turn to the domestic front, even as the last shots at Wounded Knee echoed in America’s collective ear, marked not the end of conquest but rather its renewal.”

Yet the domestic space was not only a target of invasion; it was also a site of resistance, a fertile ground for Native authors to define what counted as love, home, and kin in an era of coercive assimilation. In Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale University Press, 2013), Piatote brilliantly reads the work of late nineteenth century writers like Pauline Johnson, S. Alice Callahan, D’arcy McNickle and others as a contest over settler domestication. Piatote offers an eloquent exploration of incredible courage and literary acumen, with resonance in our own political moment.

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This month a very special edition of World Book Club coming from New York City in the USA.

We’re partnering up with the acclaimed Leonard Lopate Show’s Book Club on the New York radio station WNYC. In advance of the much anticipated film about to open worldwide we’ve come here to discuss that classic novel of The Roaring Twenties, The Great Gatsby. And who better to talk to about it than chronicler of today’s New York young urban sophisticates, novelist Jay McInerney. He is joined on stage by F Scott Fitzgerald scholar Anne Margaret Daniel and together we discuss the haunting tale of dazzling, doomed Jay Gatsby as told to through the eyes of young Midwesterner Nick Carraway.

Jay McInerney photo by David Howell.

Emily Bazelon, David Haglund, and Meghan O'Rourke celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

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Most people today think of war–or really violence of any sort–as for the most part useless. It’s better, we say, just to talk things out or perhaps buy our enemies off. And that usually works. But what if you lived in a culture where fighting was an important part of social status and earning a living? What if, say, you couldn’t get married unless you had gone to war? What if, say, you couldn’t feed your family without raiding your enemies? Such was the case with Chiricahua Apache of the Southwest. As Lance R. Blyth shows in his terrific book Chirichahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880 (Nebraska UP, 2012), war was a necessary part of Chiricahua life, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries. They needed to fight the Spanish in Janos, and there was nothing the Spanish could really do to stop them, at least in the long term. Of course the Spanish–who were, it should be said, invaders–fought back. And so the two communities entered into a two century-long struggle that only ended with the “removal” of the Chiricahua Apache by the United States in the nineteenth century. Listen to Lance tell the fascinating story.

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Slate critics Dan Kois, Hanna Rosin, and Meghan O'Rourke discuss Lawrence Wright's epic investigation into Scientology.

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This month World Book Club are guests of the American Embassy in London and Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience will be talking to US superstar thriller writer John Grisham. They will be discussing his gripping debut novel A Time To Kill, written almost 30 years ago while Grisham was still a jobbing attorney in Mississippi.

In the novel a black father takes the law into his own hands after worrying that the legal system will fail to adequately punish the two white men who brutally raped and beat his daughter. In a fascinating discussion about racism in the deep south of America hear how John Grisham has wrestled with his own feelings of prejudice, his changing views on the death penalty and how he's stumped for words when told he's beautiful!

(Image: John Grisham. Credit: Bob Krasner)

Can the spoken word be a reliable record of past events?

For many Native people, the answer is unequivocally affirmative. Histories of family, tribe, and nation, narratives of origin and migration, foodways and ceremonies, and the provisions of countless treaties have been passed down through successive generations without written documents. The colonizing society has maintained a starkly different view, elevating the written word to a position of authority and dismissing the authenticity of oral tradition. Are these two views irreconcilable?

Exploring the contested memorialization of four controversial episodes in the history of the Delaware (or Lenape) Indians’ encounter with settlers, Andrew Newman finds unexpected connections between colonial documents, recorded oral traditions, and material culture. On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is a thoughtful meditation on how we know the past.

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This month on World Book Club Harriett Gilbert will be talking with one of Sri Lanka’s leading writers, Romesh Gunesekera, about his acclaimed novel Reef.

Reef is the moving, multi award-winning story of young Triton, a talented young chef who goes to work for Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by swamps, sea movements and the island's disappearing reef.

So committed is Triton to pleasing his master’s palate that he is oblivious to the political unrest threatening his Sri Lankan paradise, and yet subtle undercurrents of impending doom do ripple through Triton’s haunting story of memory and friendship.

Slate’s Dan Kois, Hanna Rosin, and David Haglund discuss Lauren Groff’s novel of a 1970s hippie commune.

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