Whitney, Risë, and Gary analyze another recently-published novel on the next episode of Writers Who Read. Next up: The Director by Daniel Kehlmann.

The influential Austrian film director G W Pabst discovered Louise Brooks and Leni Riefenstahl, worked with Greta Garbo and Kurt Weill, and moved to Hollywood in the 1930s. Unfortunately, just as WWII began he returned to Austria to care for his ailing mother, trapping Pabst and his family in Nazi Germany and turning him into a tool of the Reich. The stark soundstage, dark shadows, and sharp camera angles of Expressionist cinema infuse Kehlmann's novel, translated from the German, chilling our bones with the horror of seeing precisely how totalitarianism breaks us.

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