All Our Wrong Todays Elan Mastai Penguin Random House LLC Release Date: February 7, 2017 ISBN 978-1-1019-8513-7 Most of us have read stories about future dystopias; for a while it seems like they dominated the speculative fiction landscape. Some of the stories would chronicle our descent from the present to […]
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore Robin Sloan Farrar, Straus and Giroux Release Date: September 24, 2013 ISBN 978-0-374-21491-3 I love it when a friend recommends a book for me to read. “I thought of you when I read this,” Ron told me as we watched our dogs gambol at the dog […]
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 […]
Boy, Snow, Bird Helen Oyeyemi Riverhead Books Release Date: March 6, 2014 ISBN 978-1-59463-139-9 They’re names. In case you’ve looked at the title of Helen Oyeyemi’s newest novel and wondered what the heck those three words might have in common, they are proper names of three of the main characters. […]
The Bookstore Deborah Meyler Gallery Books (Simon & Schuster) Publication Date: August 20, 2013 ISBN 978-1-4767-1424-0 Anyone who frequents a (no doubt) small, independent bookstore (and I hope that means everyone who may read this review) knows that there is so much more to it than the books on the […]
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.