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Open Book

Author Louise Erdrich; plus the winner of the Independent Bookshop award

Duration: 28 minutes

First broadcast: on BBC Radio 4 FMLatest broadcast: on BBC Radio 4 LW

Available for over a year

Mariella Frostrup talks to Native American writer Louise Erdrich. She's written a string of novels since first publishing Love Medicine in 1984, all set in and around a fictional Chippewa Native American reservation in North Dakota. Her latest National Book Award winning novel is "The Round House." Narrated by 13 year old Joe, the novel explores the impact on the boy , his family and the wider community when his mother is brutally raped which according to Erdrich is a crime one in three native American women will experience in their life time - while the perpetrators escape prosecution due to complex jurisdictional issues involving state versus tribal law.

The Bookseller Industry Awards in London last week included the coveted Independent Bookseller Industry Award. With the UK publishing industry announcing amazingly buoyant sales figures of 3.34 BILLION pounds this year, nominees - from Biggar in the Scottish borders to Limerick in Ireland - discuss how our treasured independent bookshops can compete not just against online, but with the ubiquitous cut price offers of chain stores, superstores and online giants. And the winner reveals the secret of her - or his- success.

With the latest adaptation of the The Great Gatsby filling cinema screens across the UK this weekend, Professor Christopher Bigsby, Director of the Arthur Miller Centre at UEA and Anne Margaret Daniel, a consultant on the Baz Luhrmann film and currently writing a book about the author, discuss why F Scott Fitzgerald is one of the America's most celebrated authors. Credited with defining the Jazz Age - a term which he himself coined- and writing quintessentially about the American dream at an epoch changing moment in the country's history, he died in 1940, aged only 44, an alcoholic with his dreams destroyed in no less devastating fashion than Gatsby's. Why do experts and readers alike rate Fitzgerald so highly?

Producer: Hilary Dunn. Show less

Contributors

Interviewed Guest:
Louise Erdrich
Interviewed Guest:
Christopher Bigsby
Interviewed Guest:
Anne Margaret Daniel
Producer:
Hilary Dunn

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