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The Thread®

The Thread from MPR News

Weekly series: Ask a Bookseller

Ask a Bookseller is where The Thread checks in with booksellers around the country about their favorite books of the moment. Listen to Ask a Bookseller to find your next favorite book.

Weekly series: Big Books and Bold Ideas

Big Books and Bold Ideas is a weekly series hosted by Kerri Miller every Friday at 11 a.m., featuring conversations about books and other literary ideas. Listen here.

Sign Up for The Thread® Newsletter

Sign up for The Thread newsletter to get reading recommendations from Kerri Miller and other bookworms around the MPR newsroom. Find reviews for new releases, as well as hidden gems you may have missed.

Follow The Thread on Facebook | Instagram

A "Beowulf" for the next hundred years

Monsters, dragons, blood and gore. And a superhero who dies trying to save the world. No, it's not the latest offering at your neighborhood cinema. It's a new translation of the epic poem "Beowulf". It's the result of years of work by two Fargo poets.

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Author says book coverage was "harmful"

Last spring, the University of Minnesota Press was at the center of a storm of protest over the publication of a book on sex education, Harmful to Minors, by Judith Levine. Levine met with reporters and the public Monday night to discuss the media firestorm that erupted even before her book was published.

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Author Neil Gaiman's latest horror novel aimed at young readers

Neil Gaiman has written "Coraline," a horror novel for children, about a little girl who discovers a malevolent netherworld hidden behind a door in her house. It's ruled by a hideous being known as "the other mother" who kidnaps Coraline's real parents. She then tries to imprison the girl herself.

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On the road with Leif Enger

Author and former MPR reporter Leif Enger writes a series of journal entries while on his book tour in 2001. His debut novel, "Peace Like a River," a Talking Volumes selection, is the subject of critical acclaim.

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The hair-owing tale of a genius

Beethoven's music has intrigued and delighted us for 200 years, but who would have thought that his hair would endure for nearly two centuries as well? This improbable longevity is the inspiration for Beethoven's Hair, Russell Martin's skillfully written biography that weaves stories of the composer's humorous but sometimes-gloomy life with the journey a lock of his hair began after his death in 1827.

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You've got (Mozart's) mail

Mozart would have loved email. It would have been the perfect outlet for his frenzied, frequent, and very personal communications. His unorthodox spelling and scattershot style would have been well served by todays more immediate and chatty electronic medium. (And I have no trouble at all imagining him firing off the latest awful jokes to his father, sister, and cousin, from a laptop on the road.) Im convinced of this after reading the composers correspondence in Robert Spaethlings smart and revealing "Mozarts Letters, Mozarts Life" (W.W. Norton, 2000).

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Ransom of the Opera

When I hear Dvorák's "Song to the Moon" from Rusalka I nearly believe I can fly. To experience Beverly Sills singing "Mariettas Lied" from Korngold's Die Tode Stadt fills me with an indescribable longing. Music like this brings feelings of "other-worldliness," the idea that a place exists where harsh reality is shut out and quiet beauty rules, even in the most unusual of story lines. Ann Patchett's lovely novel Bel Canto (HarperCollins, 2001) is filled with just this kind of magic.

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The music of family history

The spring of 1933 brought the first of many insidious measures levied against the Jews of Germany, long before the so-called "Final Solution." The systematic institutionalization of anti-Semitism included the boycott of Jewish businesses, the confiscation of property, the prohibition of marriages between Jews and Aryans and, from the earliest days, the expulsion of Jewish musicians, actors and artists from the nation's orchestras, opera companies and theaters. The little-known story of Jüdische Kulturbund is brought to light in "The Inextinguishable Symphony" (John Wiley & Sons, 2000) by Martin Goldsmith, for years a respected music host and commentator on National Public Radio.

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From Russia with controversy

An amiable, modest public figure or a morbidly sensitive, possibly suicidal, neurotic? Such are the conflicting images of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, whose birthday we celebrate this month. Though the popularity of his music is undisputed, the picture of Tchaikovsky the man has been anything but. Alexander Poznansky, a Russian music scholar at Yale, has taken a fresh look at this complex personality in "Tchaikovsky Through Others' Eyes" (University of Indiana Press, 1999) - a fascinating account of his life and career collected from the diaries of people closest to him.

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