BOOKPATHS

World

Arthur Frommer talks with NPR’s Alex Cohen about his 1957 guidebook Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, a book that “changed the way Americans viewed international travel.”

Aracataca, Colombia

“For the first time in more than two decades, Colombian author Gabriel García Marquez is returning to his hometown which he immortalized as Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Stephen Moss talks with novelist Marina Lewycka.

“There's a note for the postman pinned to the front door of Marina Lewycka's functional, foursquare house in the rowdy university quarter of Sheffield. ‘If no answer,’ it says, ‘please put packages behind the wheelie bin. Don't worry - they're only foreign books.’ A blase attitude to the new foreign editions of her bestselling first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, that arrive with every post - it had been translated into 29 languages at the last count - but she has a simple explanation. ‘What thief would be interested in foreign books?’" – from “Better Late than Never,” by Stephen Moss, The Guardian

Turkey

Richard Lea interviews Orhan Pamuk.

“Inspired by Borges and Italo Calvino, then, he began a series of books, each of which brings together some of the fragments of Turkey's literary tradition on which he has been working. It is not the plots or the characters that spark his interest in a new book, however, but the way in which it is put together. 'Most of the time the idea of a novel develops in this way,' he explains. 'I have different interests, for different books, for different little things. Then one day in the middle of the night I wake up and they are all combined with a new story, and that story holds all the little interests that I have together. Once you have the whole cosmos of the book, then you do the architecture.'" – from “If I’m at My Desk, I’m Happy,” by Richard Lea, The Guardian

Born on May 31

Ludwig Tieck
1773 in Berlin, Prussia [Germany]

Walt Whitman
1819 in West Hills, Long Island, New York

Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site and Interpretive Center

Gunnar Björling
1887 in Helsinki, Finland

Saint-John Perse
1887 in Saint-Léger-les-Feuilles, Guadeloupe

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1960

Konstantin Paustovsky
1892 in Moscow, Russia

Elizabeth Coatsworth
1893 in Buffalo, New York, USA

Judith Wright
1915 in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1946 in Bad Wöshofen, West Germany

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation

Will Hillenbrand
1960 in Cincinatti, Ohio, USA

Will Hillenbrand Website

China

Listen to Rob Gifford talk about his new book, China Road, based on his 2004 3,000-mile journey across China.

“Gifford didn't have to look far for the subjects of his stories.

‘I'd just get on a bus, and you just find the four people sitting around you all have amazing stories about their life in the countryside or their life in the city. You know, everywhere you go, you just ask the people, 'What are you doing? What's your life like?' And they just want to talk about it, and that's really what the book is.’" – from NPR Website

Born on May 30

Randolph Bourne
1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, USA

Cornelia Otis Skinner
1901 in Chicago, Illinois, USA

Countee Cullen
1903 in Louisville, Kentucky, USA

Born on May 29

G. K. Chesterton
1874 in London, England

The American Chesterton Society

Alfonsina Storni
1892 in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland

Max Brand (Frederick Schiller Faust)
1892 in Seattle, Washington, USA

T. H. White
1906 in Bombay, India

Pamela Hansford Johnson
1912 in London, England

John F. Kennedy
1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, USA

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Paul R. Ehrlich
1932 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Abdelrahman Munif
1933 in Amman, Jordan

Brock Cole
1938 in Charlotte, Michigan

Capri, Italy

Adam Begley goes “in search of Graham Greene’s Capri.”

“The house, Il Rosaio, was a rare constant in Greene's restless existence (‘one of nature's displaced persons,’ Malcolm Muggeridge called him). In 1978, Greene was made an honorary citizen of the town of Anacapri, and in a brief speech on the occasion, he gave the obvious explanation for his biannual pilgrimage to an island that wasn't at all to his taste: On Capri, he said, ‘in four weeks I do the work of six months elsewhere.’” – from “In Search of Graham Greene’s Capri,” by Adam Begley, New York Times

Born on May 28

Thomas Moore
1779 in Dublin, Ireland

Ian Fleming
1908 in London, England

Ian Fleming Centre

Patrick White
1912 in London, England

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973

Walker Percy
1916 in Birmingham, Alabama, USA

Barry Commoner
1917 in Brooklyn, New York, USA

May Swenson
1919 in Logan, Utah, USA

Heinz G. Konsalik
1921 in Cologne, Germany