The World - Books (Books-Conversation)

Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1925-1977) looked like a movie star and wrote like James Joyce. Lispector's face is on postage stamps in Latin America, but her fiction is not as well known around the world. Benjamin Moser wants to change that with his new biography of Lispector, "Why This World." He argues that Lispector's Jewishness, along with her concern with the inner world of her characters rather than their politics, has stood in the way of her international reputation. World Books...

Hungarian writer Ferenc Barns talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about The Ninth,his autobiographical novel,translated by Paul Olchvary, about growing up in a small village outside Budapest in the late 1960s. The narrator is a nine-year-old boy, the ninth child in a poor, secretive Catholic family that scrapes along by selling rosaries and religious gewgaws condemned by the Communist government.

Robert Chandler talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about a new translation of "The Foundation Pit, " a novel by Andrey Platonov, a Russian writer many critics consider the most provocative literary discovery since the fall of the Soviet Union. Poet Joseph Brodsky hailed Platonov as a master of language, a 20th century innovator in the same league as James Joyce and Franz Kafka.

Award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky talks to World Books Editor Bill Marx about "The Tanners," an early work of fiction by the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, a marginalized genius admired by J. M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, and W. G. Sebald. She also reads an excerpt from her translation, the first in English, of the 1907 novel.

Israeli artist David Polonsky talks to World Books Editor Bill Marx about the full-color graphic novel version of the Oscar-nominated animated documentary "Waltz with Bashir."

Musicians Aliana de la Guardia and Gabriela Diaz perform samples from Gyrgy Kurtg's chamber work "Kafka Fragments" and talk about the demanding piece to World Books editor Bill Marx.

John Donatich, Director of the Yale University Press, talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about The Margellos World Republic of Letters, a major new series dedicated to helping reverse the trend against literary translations by making high quality works from around the globe available in English.

Azar Nafisi, the author of the international bestseller "Reading Lolita in Tehran," talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about her new memoir, which focuses on her life in Iran as well as her personal and political responses to the Islamic Revolution during the late 1970s.

Author and book critic Helen Epstein talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about two new memoirs by migrs living in North America, Witold Rybczynski's "My Two Polish Grandfathers" and Azar Nafisi's "Things I've Been Silent About."

Romanian-born essayist and novelist Norman Manea explains to World Books editor Bill Marx why the young people in Eastern Europe's post-communist generation lack curiosity about what their parents and grandparents endured under Stalinism.

John Zeisel, the author of "I'm Still Here," along with Lisa Wong and Jonathan McPhee of Boston's Longwood Symphony Orchestra, talk to World Books host Bill Marx about evolving international views of the relationship between neuroscience and the arts, particularly the beneficial effects of music on those suffering from cognitive impairments.

Award-winning novelist Ha Jin talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about his latest book, a collection of essays that explore how imaginative writers have dealt with migration.

Polish critic Igor Stokfiszewski and Russian scholar Boris Groys talk to World Books Editor Bill Marx about how the possibility of a new "Cold War" and the pressures of globalization are influencing the arts in Eastern Europe.

World Books Editor Bill Marx talks to translator Peter Filkins, who walked into a Harvard Square bookstore, opened an obscure German novel, and discovered H. G. Adler's "The Journey," a masterpiece of Holocaust fiction.

Award-winning translator and poet David Hinton chats with World Books editor Bill Marx about "Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology," which sheds new light on the first three millennia of verse in China.

Ellen Elias-Bursac tells World Books editor Bill Marx what it is like to translate into English the work of two superb writers from the former Yugoslavia -- David Albahari and Dubravka Ugresic.

Novelist and critic Dubravka Ugresic talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about her latest collection of essays, "Nobody's Home," which trains a wryly spiky eye to a number of subjects, from the plight of public intellectuals to the fluid nature of cultural identity in the age of globalization.

Irish playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry chats with World Books editor Bill Marx about his novel "The Secret Scripture," a finalist for this year's Mann Booker Prize. The book continues Barry's quest in his fiction to explore the forgotten political nooks and theological crannies of modern Irish history.

Angolian author Jose Eduardo Agualusa talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about "The Book of Chameleons," his acclaimed novel which won the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The wrily surreal tale, narrated by a gecko who claims to be the reincarnation of Jorge Luis Borges, explores issues of truth, illusion, and shifting identity in post-civil war Angola.

Porochista Khakpour's first novel, "Sons and Other Flammable Objects," garnered enthusiastic reviews for its tragi-comic treatment of the trails and tribulations of an Iranian-American family. She talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about what it is lilke to be compared to "a young Philip Roth."