By Heather Lennon Meet Annemarie van Haeringen as we chat with her about her new book, Coco and the Little Black Dress. NorthSouth Books: What inspired you to create a picture book about Coco Chanel? Annemarie: Actually, I was asked by my Dutch publisher Leopold, and the Dutch Gemeente Museum Den Haag to make a … Continue reading Interview with Annemarie van Haeringen, author of COCO AND THE LITTLE BLACK DRESS
Winter Let this winter pass into another winter. No more stately brooding. No bluebird’s eggs. No driven mating or well-built nests. I want the frost to blast the ground forever with every seed or shoot that it conceals. Leave streets as gray as winter has them. The muddy slush of butchered days, two blue mittens … Continue reading The Hunger in Plain View by Ester Naomi Perquin
During the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, the Dutch author Anna Woltz and I switched places. She was hunkered down in New York City while I followed the news from the safety (and sunny weather) of Lisbon, Portugal. But she turned her frightening experience into a page-turning novel, translated by Laura Watkinson and published by the … Continue reading Book Review: A Hundred Hours of Night
by Karen Van Drie This is a very compelling wartime diary of what a women experienced living in Berlin at the end of World War II. The keeper of this diary, which she originally published anonymously, describes the daily struggle to stay alive as her national leaders, nation-state, and city fell to an invading Soviet … Continue reading A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City by Anonymous
WEDNESDAY 1. No one walks through London with a machete. Unless you count the two men passing him just now. Niall had already wrapped up taking pictures of the spot where the Effra River had once emptied into the Thames, when one of the two men looked back at him. The man’s gaze lingered … Continue reading Fade to Black by Zoë Beck
Mr. Squirrel and the Moon Sebastian Meschenmoser, David Henry Wilson (Trans.) NorthSouth Books, 2015 ISBN 978-0735841567 Winter 2015 Top Ten IndieNext Pick When Mr. Squirrel awakens to find that the moon has landed on his tree, he frantically tries to get rid of it before someone suspects him of stealing it and puts him in jail. … Continue reading Title Pick: Mr. Squirrel and the Moon
Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Filkins (Trans.) Zephyr Press, 2006 ISBN 0939010844 LIBRARIES The shelves sag. The volumes are weighted down with the past. Their sweat is dust. Their impulse is rigidity. They no longer struggle. They have saved themselves upon the island of knowledge. Sometimes they've lost their conscience. Here and … Continue reading Darkness Spoken by Ingeborg Bachmann
by Marcia Lynx Qualey Originally published on Arabic Literature (in English) Arab-German literature in German doesn’t have the broad, 19th- and early-20th-century roots of Arab-American or Arab-French literatures. But it is a vibrant and growing space, surely to grow much more in the coming decades: Certainly, there were individual Arab texts written in German in the 19th century. … Continue reading 6 Arab-German Authors from a Growing Scene
A bestial Brave New World is on the horizon: Some 50,000 creatures around the globe—including whales, leopards, flamingoes, bats and snails—are being equipped with digital tracking devices. The data gathered and studied by major scientific institutes about their behavior will not only aid in conservation efforts and warn us about tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, … Continue reading Title Pick: Alexander Pschera, Animal Internet
WHEN I WAS SIX, my grandfather stopped recognizing me. He lived in the house down the hill from ours, and because I cut through his orchard on the way to school, occasionally he threw a piece of wood at me, saying I had no business on his land. Sometimes, though, he liked to see me … Continue reading The Old King in His Exile by Arno Geiger
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 