Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry
Episode: Madeleine Thien : The Book of Records
Description: The Book of Records is many things: a book of historical fiction and speculative fiction, a meditation on time and on space-time, on storytelling and truth, on memory and the imagination, a book that impossibly conjures the lives and eras of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu and the political theorist Hannah Arendt not as mere ghostly presences but portrayed as vividly and tangibly as if they lived here and now in the room where we hold this very book. But most of all this is a book about books, about words as amulets, about s...