There are seven stories in the world. It’s a well used maxim and not necessarily true. (Kipling, for example, claimed there were sixty-nine stories in the world). But the truth remains that various plots have been invented and reinvented since the beginning of the press. Some have been re-imagined so […]
The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri “How do you clothe a book?” is the how this small, but powerful volume begins. For a writer whose stories are as personal and complex as Jhumpa Lahiri’s, a cover’s design presents a different set of questions. The Clothing of Books began as […]
Despite the controversy surrounding his authorship and even the rumors spread about his life, Shakespeare is still an artist whose works, whose life, spans the centuries. As Ben Jonson wrote, Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time.” That his sonnets and plays have stretched beyond his generation and […]
Sometimes, it isn’t all that difficult to sort out what will happen in a novel. It does, of course, depend solely on “who” you’re reading and, perhaps, your personal ability to pick up hints, to notice what has been foreshadowed. But sometimes, when the plot is thick and the author […]
It’s happened to you before. You’re invested in a great book, in the flux and flow of a twisting plot, of multidimensional characters that make you mad, make you cry, maybe even make you scream out loud. Then, after all the hours you’ve invested in the book, all the possibilities, […]
We’ve all heard it before: “Books are always better than the films they’re based on.” The book vs film debate is likely never to be resolved. From the British Vivien Leigh taking on the role of the very southern Scarlett O’Hara to Will Smith portraying a completely different version of […]
Death and taxes, as the old cliche goes. Both are unavoidable, and while we won’t give you our political opinions on paying taxes, we will say that it’s never easy or expected when we lose someone we love. Even if that “someone” is known to us from afar, from the […]
The Oysters of Locmariaquer, by Eleanor Clark Late in Eleanor Clark’s extraordinary book, she tells us the oyster needs the same landscape that a plein air painter does: a certain air, light, chemistry. “The explanation,” she writes, “might be quite simple, not esoteric at all—in some common equation of factors […]
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, essays by Michael Chabon The trope of fatherly wisdom, borne of experience and dispensed with measured calm, is a wonderful thing, but how realistic it? There are memoirs about fathers such as Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland and Will […]
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín At the heart of Colm Tóibín‘s new novel is the story of a woman, a story, he says, he’d been circling around for years. It’s there, in his novels and stories (eight novels and a collection) as a metaphor, an idea at the perimeter. That novel, […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.