New York graphic artist Art Spiegelman is getting a retrospective. Young German and Arab musicians jam together in Tunisia, and the world turns its attention to the annual question of who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The graphic novel Mouse made Art Spiegelman world famous. It told the story of Spiegelman's parents, who were Jewish Holocaust survivors. In the novel, Jews are depicted as mice, while Nazis are cats. It earned the author a Pulitzer Prize. Now there's a Spiegelman retrospective on at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
Every year bookmakers set the odds, experts look into their crystal balls, and book fans wait for the doors to open in Stockholm and the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature to be announced.
Arts.21 examines the special aura surrounding this award and looks at this year's good bets and the perennial also-rans.
In Tunisia, young musicians from the Arab world are hooking up with their German peers. The project "Orient meets Occident" mixes jazz and traditional Tunisian malouf.
Arts 21 takes a trip to Hammamet to hear the music and also to ask: What has become of the Arab Spring?
In 1989, Iran's Revolutionary Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against writer Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses, offering a large reward for his murder. For 12 years, Rushdie had to live in hiding under a pseudonym. Now he's written an account of that trying time entitled Joseph Anton.