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Brian Morton, an accomplished novelist, first turned to non-fiction in his new book, “Tasha: A Son’s Memoir.” In this week’s podcast, he discusses his mother’s life, the difficulties in caring for her towards the end of her life, and what led him to become a memoirs.
“I started writing a few pages about her and I enjoyed the freedom to write directly, to write without having to come up with characters,” Morton says. “I love writing about fictional characters, that’s my favorite part of writing. But it takes a very long time for me to give birth to them. And here was my mother, perhaps the most colorful character I’ve ever written about, who was there.”
Rachel Careau visits the podcast to discuss her new translation of Colette’s “Chéri” and its sequel, “The End of Chéri”.
“One of the problems with her loose style is that the sentences can lack some words that would normally oil a sentence,” Careau says of the job of translating the books. “So they can sound a little bare, sometimes a little syncopated. And the sound was very important to me, and I was really guided by the sound. But it’s hard to get that bone-on-bone style flowing.”
Also in this week’s episode, Lauren Christensen and Joumana Khatib talk about what they’ve read. John Williams is the landlord.
Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We Read”:
We’d love to hear what you think about this episode, and about the Book Review podcast in general. You can send them to books.†
