SUMMARY: Marlon James is best known for writing literary fiction, including “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. But his latest book, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” draws on a lifelong love of comics and fantasy. James sits down with Jeffrey Brown to discuss why he still seeks "a sword and some sorcery" and the importance of seeing oneself reflected in narrative.
SUMMARY: The U.S. is reportedly experiencing illegal immigration at the highest rates since 2007, with significant increases in the number of unaccompanied minors. It is these child migrants who are the subject of Valeria Luiselli’s book “Lost Children Archive.” Luiselli talks to Jeffrey Brown about her experience helping child asylum seekers, balancing truth and fiction and "political violence."
SUMMARY: Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward writes the stories of the people and places she found absent in literature while growing up. Her new fiction novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” weaves the supernatural with genuine characters that are molded by the rural and poverty-stricken life in her Mississippi hometown. Ward joins Jeffrey Brown to talk about her community and the stories that have come from it.
SUMMARY: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” was the beginning of a bestselling series of thrillers, published after author Stieg Larsson's death. Recently, Swedish journalist and writer David Lagercrantz was tapped to continue the series. Lagercrantz joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss "The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye,” its iconic central character and the current events that permeate the story.
SUMMARY: In the new novel "House of Names," one of today's leading contemporary writers looks back to the Trojan War and Greek mythology for inspiration. Colm Toibin joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss why he wanted to write a novel about a family drama in ancient Greece and the connection to civil wars in our own time.
SUMMARY: America's democracy and Constitution have been replaced by a theocratic autocracy where women have lost their rights and many of them have become property, valued and controlled for the ability to bear children for wealthy families. That's the story of “The Handmaid's Tale,” a novel that's now a major television miniseries. Jeffrey Brown talks to author Margaret Atwood and others.
SUMMARY: In "Exit West," a city in the Muslim world is plunged into violence and two lovers join the mass migration of our time. Mohsin Hamid's story about refugees is a novel, not journalism, but it combines the surreal with the very real. Hamid sits down with Jeffrey Brown to discuss what inspired him and why he says he's seeing a "failure of imagination" around the world.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): An unnamed city in the Muslim world is plunged into violence, and two young lovers are forced to flee, becoming a small part of the mass migrations of our era. But they travel through time and space through magic doors.
“Exit West” is a novel combining the very real with the almost surreal, imagining individuals behind today's headlines.
Author Mohsin Hamid has spent parts of his life in the U.S. and Europe. He now lives in his native city of Lahore, Pakistan.
And nice to see you again.
MOHSIN HAMID, Author, “Exit West”: Nice to see you.
JEFFREY BROWN: This is in one way a very up-to-the-minute look at the dislocation of individual lives, but, of course, it's not journalism. It's art. It's a novel.
Tell me how you thought about what you were after.
MOHSIN HAMID: Well, I have been moving around my whole life, California, Pakistan, London, New York, Pakistan again.
And I wanted to write about the experience of migration. And I also felt this resistance to migrants was growing, and I wanted to write in response to that.
SUMMARY: Confronted by her own grandmother’s illness, writer and neuroscientist Lisa Genova started her exploration of Alzheimer’s with one question: What does it actually feel like to have the disease? Her resulting novel, “Still Alice,” was adapted into a film that has been nominated for an Academy Award. Jeffrey Brown interviews Genova about why she turned to fiction.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): A new film, and the book that inspired it, are getting high praise this awards season for the spotlight they cast on the toll of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Jeffrey Brown looks at the film and its subject, part of our occasional feature, 'NewsHour Goes to the Movies.'
JULIANNE MOORE, Actress: Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of young children.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): When we first meet Alice Howland, she’s 50 years old, an accomplished professor of linguistics, but something is beginning to happen.
JULIANNE MOORE: I hope we convince you that by observing these baby steps into the — into — I — I knew I shouldn’t have had that champagne.
JEFFREY BROWN: We watch as Alice loses words, gets lost in familiar places, forgets appointments. Eventually, she’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
JULIANNE MOORE: Why won’t you take me seriously?
JEFFREY BROWN: It’s an up-close and sometimes raw portrait shown from the perspective of someone with a disease that today affects more than five million Americans, including 200,000 who experience early onset.
