Arts & Life

The board game Monopoly will no longer include the iron token. After a month of voting, fans have chosen a cat as its replacement. Players will start seeing the new feline visitor on their Monopoly boards by fall of this year.

  This past July, when A.J. Hartley made his annual journey to New York City’s Thrillerfest, the UNC Charlotte theatre professor found himself swapping stories with a fellow Brit, New York Times best-selling author Lee Child of Jack Reacher fame. While sharing drinks at the cocktail hour, the two compared notes about growing up in England. While Childs drew on his experience of being the biggest, baddest dude in his neighborhood to create his larger than life Reacher character, Hartley took a softer, more cerebral route.

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, two kids, split level in the Virginia suburbs. They're on a travel agency and drive a big boxy Oldsmobile - a typical American family in Ronald Reagan's America, except for their other job as Soviet spies.

Last Wednesday night, when "The Americans" debuted on FX, an FBI agent moved in next door, which prompted Phillip, played Matthew Rhys, to suggests to Kerri Russell's Elizabeth it might be a good time to defect.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE AMERICANS")

Wednesday, Hasbro announced that it was welcoming a new member of the Monopoly-token family. And because it asked the Internet, it wound up with a cat. (For whatever reason, the Internet was not offered Gotye or a bacon cupcake.)

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

From Swift to Orwell, political satire has played a major role in the history of European fiction. Much of it takes on an allegorical cast, but not all. The Fall of the Stone City, an incisive, biting work by Ismail Kadare — one of Europe's reigning fiction masters — refines our understanding of satire's nature. Kadare's instructive and delightful book takes us from the 1943 Nazi occupation of a provincial Albanian town, the ancient stone city of Gjirokaster, to the consolidation of communist rule there a decade later.