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 […]
The Places In-Between, by Rory Stewart In 2002, Rory Stewart made a walk across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul. A scholar of Afghan history and language, he aimed in those grave first years after 9/11, to learn “what [Afghanistan] was like now.” Part memoir, part political and cultural history, Stewart […]
Out of Place: A Memoir, by Edward Said Edward Said, the prolific author, political activist, pianist, and music critic, rose to academic stardom in 1978 with the publication of Orientalism, a seminal critique of the appropriations and misrepresentations that founded the Western study of the East. Said, who died in […]
Orphans: Essays, by Charles D’Ambrosio Hold a copy of Orphans in your hand, and its singularity is apparent. With its small format and the slender ribbon bookmark, the book can easily be tucked into a pocket, kept close to be read anywhere. Published in 2005, Orphans has since become a […]
Silence of the SolariBook Two of The Amber Throne SeriesMichael Johnston In 2017, Michael Johnston introduced his Amber Throne series with the novel Solari, which introduced readers to a world of warlords and priests, of shining cities, desert strongholds and lush forest domains. Kingdoms elbowed each other for prestige and […]
Passage to Ararat, by Michael J. Arlen During the Armenian genocide, 1.2 million Armenians were systematically murdered between 1915 and 1922 by Ottoman Turkish forces, and in Michael J. Arlen’s elegiac memoir, Passage to Ararat, winner of the National Book Award in 1975, Arlen writes to understand his own family’s […]
These Charming People, stories by Michael Arlen In the period just after World War One, what was known as the fast set became a fascination for some English writers. The Bright Young Things of the 1920s—decadent young people whose disillusionment with the Great War caused old ideas about society and […]
Blue Nights, by Joan Didion Blue Nights is a counterpart to Didion’s 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which tracks the aftermath of her husband John Gregory Dunne’s unexpected death in 2003. At the time of Dunne’s death, their daughter, Quintana Roo, was hospitalized, in a coma from a […]
The Empty Family: Stories by Colm Tóibín Colm Tóibín’s 2011 collection, The Empty Family is a book I always keep close at hand, dipping into the pages to take in the voices. Tóibín’s stories mine the loneliness of living outside your home country, and his characters confront the pull of […]
The Films in My Life, by Francois Truffaut We are lucky that Francois Truffaut was in his short life a prolific filmmaker and a prolific critic as well. One of the founders of the French new wave, Truffaut broke cinematic ground with personal films like The 400 Blows, Jules and […]
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.