World Book Club Folgen

Presenter Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to acclaimed American author Paul Theroux about his bestselling travel book Deep South. After fifty years crossing the globe, seeking adventure and stories to tell about places far from home, Theroux travels deep into the heart of his native country and discovers a land as profoundly foreign as anything he has previously experienced abroad. He finds in the deep south a place of contradiction, full of unforgettable characters, landscapes, music, and sense of community, but also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. On four road trips across four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits small-town churches and gun shows, meets mayors and social workers, writers and reverends. The spectre of racism and the history slavery is never far away, but more often than not Theroux is met with the warmest of welcomes and a willingness to engage in deep and wide-ranging conversations.(Picture: Paul Theroux. Photo credit: Steve McCurry.)

World Book Café travels to Paris to meet some of the French capital’s newest writers. Authors Mahir Guven, Blandine Rinkel, Laurent Petitmangin and Capucine Delattre discuss taking on the literary establishment and finding new ways to express themselves. Like many places in the world, questions of equality, diversity and freedom of expression are top of the agenda in France. But it is complicated; the ideal of universalism - meaning every citizen is considered to be the same regardless of class or ethnicity - is at the heart of the French republic. Does this 'universalism' leave space for the 21st Century desire to celebrate difference, and how can writing help reconcile these complex ideas? Image: The skyline of Paris, 9 December 2022 (Credit: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters)

This month World Book Club visits Paris, France to be guests of the iconic bookshop on the Left Bank of the River Seine, Shakespeare & Co. There Harriett Gilbert and a bookshop audience talk to acclaimed French writer Marie Darrieussecq about her extraordinary novel Pig Tales.Pig Tales is the story of a young woman who works at a shady Parisian massage parlour, becoming a favourite with her lustful clients until, that is, she slowly and alarmingly metamorphoses into a pig. A dark feminist fable of political and sexual corruption, and a grim warning of what can happen in a society without a soul, Pig Tales scandalised its readers when it first came out and became the most popular first novel published in decades.(Picture: Marie Darrieussecq. Photo credit: Charles Freger.)