Yearly Archives: 2019

Book Excerpt

“The Cure Hunter” from Province of the Heart

by Francesca Rheannon

In 2001, one week after the 9/11 attacks, I arrived in the rugged, sparsely populated region of southern France’s Haute Provence for a long-planned stay. I had come to write about my father’s role in one small corner of a decades-old war, World War II, but found myself paralyzed by 9/11 and the U.S. response. In this frightening new reality, the book seemed irrelevant. But, as I tried to come to grips with this world torn apart, an entirely different book emerged, one I came to call “Province of the Heart.”

I settled in a tiny village of no more than one hundred souls, in the shadow of the mountain where the great ProvenÁ§al writer Jean Giono had once created a community of visionaries dedicated to the land and its people.

Over the eight months I lived there, that land and its people stitched my world back up again, through the deep succor of the relationship between humans and the natural world that embraced them. Yet my neighbors were no innocents living out of time; instead, they clung more fiercely to the beauty they had for knowing how much it was threatened.

The following is one story from Province of the Heart, “The Cure Hunter.” Continue reading

Podcast

David Treuer, THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE

Native American writer and critic David Treuer talks about his latest book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. It’s a sweeping history of the resilience of Native America in the face of oppression and injustice. (Riverhead Books, January 2019.)

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Podcast

Jules Feiffer, THE GHOST SCRIPT, Art Spiegelman, BREAKDOWNS & Amos Oz Remembered

We talk with the great cartoonist Jules Feiffer about the third graphic novel in his noir trilogy about the Hollywood blacklist of the 1940s and 50s, The Ghost Script. Then we replay part of our 2008 interview with comic artist Art Spiegelman. Finally, we remember the late Israeli writer Amos Oz and his last book, Dear Zealots. Continue reading