Terry Pratchett is a best-selling English novelist and author of the Discworld series. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire and, in 2009, was knighted for his services to literature.
Originally published on Wed September 26, 2012 7:20 am
In 2011, NPR's Morning Edition interviewed fantasy author Terry Pratchett about becoming a legalized-suicide advocate in his native England, after his diagnosis with early-onset Alzheimer's.
Stephen Marche's latest book is How Shakespeare Changed Everything.
Just as the fanciest chefs will happily eat simple cheese and toast so long as it's prepared properly, literary writers will happily read genre fiction, as long as it's prepared properly. And the best preparer of hard-boiled crime fiction, or at least my favorite, was Jim Thompson. Though he was the pulpiest of pulp writers, he was also the densest and most intense and most complicated. His cheese on toast is like melted Gruyere over crusty fresh baguette.
And let's go next to West Africa, where logging rights to more than 60 percent of Liberia's virgin rainforests have been granted to forestry companies since President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf came to power six years ago. A British advocacy group says the majority of those contracts are unregulated and warns of fraud and mismanagement. The government of Liberia says it is commissioning a full-scale investigation.
Our last word today in business today is poison, as in box office poison. That's what John Crawford was once called by theater owners.
But she showed them, with her comeback movie, "Mildred Pierce."
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
When she was nominated for Best Actress, Crawford was so nervous, she skipped the Academy Award ceremony. Last night her Oscar from "Mildred Pierce" sold at auction for $426,732.
GREENE: And here's what John Crawford said about that Oscar: I deserved it.
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