14/11/2009

It's not often that a group of homeless disabled guys gain record contracts and international acclaim, but this group, from the streets of Kinshasa, are receiving plaudits from music lovers around the world. We find out how they're coping with fame.

It is the first map to show the new World as a separate continent, the first to suggest the existence of the Pacific and it coined the name America. In short the 1507 Waldseemuller Map changed our world view for ever. At a time when Google Earth is throwing the world of cartography into flux, The Strand talks to Toby Lester, the author of a new book about the Waldseemuller Map and asks what it as to tell us today.

Short story collections rarely sell more than a few thousand copies but true to form John Grisham's first short story collection has sparked a publishing price war in the US. He is the bestselling author of The Pelican Brief, The Firm and A Time to Kill after all. But can the master of plot write in the trickier short format? Find out on The Strand.

A new stage adaptation of Mario Vargas Llosa's book Captain Pantaleon and the Special Service has just opened in New York - as a musical. This bureaucratic farce has already been made into a film, twice, neither of them to the author's satisfaction What will the notoriously critical author make of the adaption? The Strand finds out.

Claude Mackay wrote a poem in 1919 called, 'If we must die' in response to race riots across American cities. It was a poem of such quality that it became an anthem of resistance everywhere and was used by Sir Winston Churchill to encourage troops in the second world war. But he and his speechwriters never attributed the words to Mackay...