There are quite a few memorable first sentences in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Or, my […]
If tasked with assembling a single shelf of books from 2014 that I most wanted to keep close by, these would be the books that made the cut. They aren’t necessarily the “best” books of 2014 – they aren’t all award winning or critically acclaimed or best sellers. What they […]
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.