Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, by Graham Russell Gao Hodges Anna May Wong was the first internationally acclaimed Asian American actor, with a career that spanned decades, from 1919 to 1961, and Hodges’ biography is a meticulously researched and carefully constructed account of one of early […]
The Love of A Good Woman, Stories by Alice Munro The short story has few practitioners as skilled as Alice Munro, who turns 90 this July, and who’s all but required reading during #ShortStoryMonth. Munro famously began writing stories as a young mother, finding the story took “less time.” (See […]
The Dead Fish Museum: Stories, by Charles D’Ambrosio A classic read for #shortstorymonth is Charles D’Ambrosio’s 2006 story collection The Dead Fish Museum, set in the Pacific Northwest landscape, home to the majestic Shasta Cascade mountain range, conifer forests, and crisp air, a place that in these stories informs character. […]
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, by Zadie Smith This collection came about by accident, Zadie Smith tells us in the foreword, but the voice and curiosity that drives it makes this a seamless and satisfying read. My hope, as a reader of essays, is to learn something, whether the topic […]
SCI-FI Project Hail Mary: A Novel, by Andy Weir Author of The Martian, Weir releases his book about “Ryland Grace, the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission…” Immunity Index, by Sue Burke Burke tackles a dystopian future where the US is facing growing food shortages, stark inequality, and a growing […]
The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton I knew from the start that things would go badly for Ralph Marvell. He’s a writer who spends more time thinking about writing than actually doing it: ‘You ought to write’; they had one and all said it to him from the […]
How to Grow Old Disgracefully: An Autobiography, by Hermione Gingold If you’re a fan of classic films, say, Vincente Minnelli’s 1958 musical, Gigi, or classic stagings of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, you already know Hermione Gingold, the earthy actress with the husky voice and wicked sense of irony. Otherwise, […]
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford If this novel had been published under the title the author wanted, The Saddest Story, contemporary readers might have had a difficult time locating a copy. Fortunately, Ford Madox Ford agreed to his publisher’s suggestion of The Good Soldier, and with that, the […]
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 […]
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.