Author: The Portraits of Beowulf Sheehan. By Beowulf Sheehan. Foreword by Salman Rushdie. If you need a gift for the book lovers on your list, this is the coffee table book everyone’s talking about—at least those who love books and their writers. Beowulf Sheehan, the literary world’s foremost photographer, has […]
I feel so blessed that I can “work” from home as a book reviewer, essayist and occasionally as a literary editor, and to comfortably say that I read for a living. It’s like living the dream (well, until the bills come in, but that’s neither here nor there). But I […]
While the variety shows and special events were fun, and the panels and workshops were informative, while being around a crowd of like-minded people and be able to rub elbows with all sorts of fun folks is wonderful, what makes NerdCon: Stories so memorable for me is how it […]
It was my distinct pleasure to be able to attend the 2nd Annual NerdCon: Stories convention last weekend at the Minneapolis Convention Center. The brainchild of Vlogbrother Hank Green and author Patrick Rothfuss, the two day conference featured over 60 special guests including authors, actors, artists, narrators, podcasters, puppeteers, librarians, […]
So I was tooling around on Facebook last night – something I do far too often – and I was getting pissed. I know that I’ve pretty much created my Facebook feed by liking certain posts and following certain pages, so what shows up has been geared to what I’ve […]
Hi, my name is Sharon. I’m a library request addict. It used to be that I would only request a few books a week from my local library. Books I’d been wanting to read for a while or books that friends had recommended, occasionally a title I had read about […]
On June 6, 2014, freelance journalist Ruth Graham wrote an article for the online magazine Slate entitled “Against YA” that was published with the tagline, “Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children.” Using as her main examples John Green’s The Fault […]
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry Gabrielle Zevin Algonquin Books First Edition: April 1, 2014 ISBN 978-1-61620-321-4 What a lovely gem of a book! A.J. Fikry is a recently widowed fellow who owns a struggling bookstore on tiny Alice Island, Massachusetts. He’s only in his mid-thirties, but seems older due […]
We all have heard the stories about great works being rejected by publishers. Many of these stories are humorous because they are in the past, and the recipient or the target of those rejections have become celebrated. We laugh – or if we are unkind, we snicker – at the […]
A great, great, great short video (his most recent “vlogbrothers” video) from John Green (an amazing writer) on Perspective. It’s a “yes!” thing to experience.
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.