Nolen: The first TB patient that I sat down with in Nairobi was a man who had extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB — essentially there’s a just a very slim chance that the only drugs we know about will actually cure him. We’re out of options. And he’d come in that day, like he had…
The editor-in-chief of a Taiwanese publishing house received a three-year prison sentence after a Chinese court convicted him of inciting separatism, a Chinese government spokesperson said Wednesday. The case raised concern about the risks of publishing books critical of the Chinese government and system, even outside mainland China. Li Yanhe is a Chinese citizen who…
It was shortly after 2 a.m. on March 2, the police said, when two members of the British Royal Air Force approached a statue of Paddington Bear, sitting placidly on a park bench in Newbury, England, and holding his favorite snack: a sandwich dripping with marmalade. The men then kicked, broke apart and stole Paddington,…
Dear readers, To live in this city is sometimes to be subject to random, unheralded encounters with the great and the good: a sitcom star fumbling for her MetroCard; a famously misanthropic novelist, happy as a clam in the stands at a Yankees game; a disgraced former governor looking entirely too unbothered at the bagel…
Hong Kong is a difficult place to run an independent bookshop. Rents are high and space is limited, but navigating the law has also become harder in recent years. China imposed a strict national security law on Hong Kong in 2020, and the government has also begun enforcing a dormant, colonial-era sedition law. The laws’…
The day her father and dozens of other men were convicted of raping her mother in a trial that had gripped France was an acute personal tragedy to Caroline Darian. She escaped the Avignon courthouse and was enveloped in a giant crowd of women blocking traffic and chanting their love and gratitude for her and…
The Haitian artist and writer known as Frankétienne, who published the first novel written entirely in Haitian Creole and who, as the nation’s foremost literary lion, refracted its chaos and disorder through art, died on Thursday at his home in Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital. He was 88. The Haitian Culture Ministry announced the death. The…
The majority of the books nominated for this year’s International Booker Prize, the prestigious award for fiction translated into English, are under 200 pages long. Only one is over 300 pages: Mircea Cartarescu’s 627-page “Solenoid,” translated by Sean Cotter. It is also one of the most high-profile novels on the list. Many literary critics have…
Maria Teresa Horta, a Portuguese feminist writer who helped shatter her conservative country’s strictures on women, died on Feb. 4 at her home in Lisbon. She was 87. Her death was announced on Facebook by her publisher, Dom Quixote. The Portuguese prime minister, Luis Montenegro, paid tribute to her on X, calling her “an important…
The Israeli police have raided a pair of Palestinian bookstores in East Jerusalem, arresting two of their owners and confiscating books, in a move that came as Israel tightens its restrictions on free speech and cultural activities for Palestinians across the country. The police on Monday confirmed the arrests of two brothers, Mahmood Muna and…