The Best of NPR Books for March 19, 2015

This week: Fashion revolution, art crime, Terry Pratchett, the Forbidden City and Cinderella. View this email in your browser update preferences

This week, the French go bonkers for American fashion (no, really!), and we revisit a famous unsolved art heist in Boston and a legendary Asian-American nightclub in San Francisco. Plus, where to start reading Terry Pratchett (hint: anywhere) and an epic meditation on the history of Cinderella. Author Interviews How A 1970s Fashion Faceoff Put American Designers In The Spotlight In The Battle of Versailles, Robin Givhan tells the story of the groundbreaking runway show that pitched French couture designers against American up-and-comers. Read this story Fine Art 25 Years After Art Heist, Empty Frames Still Hang In Boston's Gardner Museum On March 18, 1990, robbers stole $500 million in art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Author Stephen Kurkjian explains why anyone would bother to steal work so priceless it couldn't be sold. Read this story Book News & Features There's No Wrong Place To Start Reading Pratchett Terry Pratchett wrote so many books that it can be hard to know where to begin, especially with the lengthy Discworld series. Critic Tasha Robinson says there's really no wrong place to dive in. Read this story Code Switch These Nightclub Entertainers Paved The Way For Asian-Americans In Showbiz Forbidden City was part of a Chinese-American nightclub scene that flourished in 1940s and '50s San Francisco. But between racial taunts and scandalized parents, its performers didn't have it easy. Read this story Monkey See A Girl, A Shoe, A Prince: The Endlessly Evolving Cinderella We take a stroll through just a little of the cultural history of Cinderella, the shoe-wearing, prince-finding, stepmother-vexing heroine who's been around for hundreds of years — at least. Read this story

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