Listening to it now, and it’s really interesting . . .

(UPDATE: Thanks Idra for name-checking us re: Merce Rodoreda and Death in Spring. Much, much appreciated. And to add some information, Graywolf did Time of the Doves, My Cristina, and Camellia Street. University of Nebraska Press did Rodoreda’s A Broken Mirror.)

We continue our Underappreciated summer reading series with a look at Mercè Rodoreda, who wrote The Time of the Doves in exile after Franco’s regime began to suppress her native Catalan language and culture. A powerful story of a young shopkeeper living through the Spanish civil war, it’s considered by many to be the best Catalan novel of all time. Author Sandra Cisneros tells us why it should be more widely read.

If you’d like, you can listen to the show live , or visit this page later today or tomorrow to listen to the . We’ll be publishing Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Springtime—her final novel—next year.

Here’s an with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—talking about Wizard of the Crown—on the Leonard Lopate show.