The Thread® - Books and Literary News

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Talking Volumes

Talking Volumes is an annual event series featuring notable authors in conversation about their new books. Presented by MPR News and The Minnesota Star Tribune. 

'The World Goes On,' with tiny moments of joy amid the uncertainty
Susan Sontag once called author Laszlo Krasznahorkai the "contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse," but his new book -- while disturbing -- isn't as hopeless as that might lead you to think.
Brush up your Shelley with 'Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years'
Christopher Frayling's new celebration of "Frankenstein" is half art book, half scholarly study, tracing the famous monster's path from page to stage to screen, just in time for his 200th birthday.
A book about the "small acts that can turn friends into family"
"I didn't want it to end. I tell you, anyone who reads this book is going to fall in love with Arthur Truluv, and with his new family as well," said bookseller Vivien Jennings.
When making books was as much of an art as writing them
The Larkspur Press in Kentucky is two years behind schedule, with no plans to catch up. Printer Gray Zeitz sets each letter of the book by hand and then prints on a press from the early 1900s.
Thread Book Hour: Stephen Greenblatt and Mark Bowden
Thread Book Hour featuring Stephen Greenblatt on "The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve" and Mark Bowden on "Hue, 1968."
A classics professor explains 'Why Bob Dylan Matters'
Harvard professor Richard F. Thomas teaches a popular class on the importance of Bob Dylan, and now he's turned it into a book, full of stories, personal history and the occasional comparison to Ovid.
Finding humanity in a computer lab
Bookseller Sarah Hutton recommends a novel that blends a family mystery with the story of a computer learning to be human.