Story Archives of 'Books'

New York City voters gave Michael Bloomberg a narrow win in yesterday’s mayoral election. Bloomberg spent an estimated $100 million to beat Comptroller William Thompson. Much of that money paid for mailers, ads, and robocalls boasting about Bloomberg’s record on crime and education.

Bloomberg made education a priority in his first mayoral run, back in 2001. He vowed to do for public schools what Rudy Giuliani had done for public safety.

Today we’re going to learn about three kids who slipped through the cracks of New York’s educational system. Beth Fertig is a DuPont award-winning senior reporter for WNYC Radio in New York City. In 2006, she met Yamilka, a young woman who graduated from a South Bronx high school knowing only eight letters of the alphabet. At 22 years old, Yamilka would get lost because she couldn’t read the subway signs.

Fertig found other graduates who were completely illiterate, and in the process, uncovered deep divisions in education policy and expensive attempts to compensate for a failing system. She tells those stories in her new book Why Can't U Teach Me 2 Read?: Three Students and a Mayor Put Our Schools to the Test. Beth Fertig joins us from WNYC Radio in New York.

Adam Walker is a 20 year-old undergrad at Columbia University who’s greatest ambitions are to become a poet and avoid the draft. It’s 1967. Walker’s literary ambitions are derailed shortly after meeting a visiting professor from Paris and his alluring girlfriend. Then things go terribly wrong.

A murder, revenge, growing obsessions and madness, and even the taboo subject of incest -- or maybe not. It’s difficult to tell what really happens since Adam is the protagonist of Invisible, a new novel by Paul Auster, which comes out today.

Auster has shown himself to be a master of literary illusions.

Invisible picks up on themes running through previous works like he New York Trilogy, Leviathan and Moon Palace. Invisible walks the thin lines between authorship and truth; imagination and memory.

Paul Auster joins us now from his home in Brooklyn.

The first ever Boston Book Festival kicks off on Saturday. It’s a star-studded affair, with a keynote address by Orhan Pamuk. Authors Richard Russo, Anita Diamant and Dennis Lehane are among the literary world attractions. As is, inexplicably, Hollywood actress Alicia Silverstone. Venues are all near Copley Square and they are all free.

One panel caught our eye. It’s called And Now for Something Completely Different, and it’s running a little under the radar.

One of the speakers is cartoonist R. Sikoryak, and he’s the only comic artist on the bill. His new collection Masterpiece Comics delivers adaptations of literary classics, such as Crime and Punishment rendered in Bob Kane-era Batman style, or Charlie Brown as a cockroach in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. R. Sikoryak joins us with more on Masterpiece Comics.

And if you’re interested in comics history, there’s an exhibit opening Saturday at Keene State College that’ll catch your eye. It’s called "Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics" and it’s showing at the Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery. The works range from early newspaper strips to digital internet comics, and feature work by minority and women artists.