Christopher Paolini

Excerpt: TO SLEEP IN A SEA OF STARS by Christopher Paolini

Today on LitStack, we’re proud to host the full excerpt of Christopher Paolini’s space odyssey, TO SLEEP IN A SEA OF STARS from Tor Books. The book “follows Kira Navárez, who, during a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, finds an alien relic that thrusts her into the wonders […]

Congratulations to Christopher Paolini, author of the popular Inheritance Cycle on the upcoming release of his novel TO SLEEP IN A SEAS OF STARS. Today on LitStack we’ve got a small glimpse of an excerpt we’ll be featuring on Friday leading up to the September launch of this title so […]

Birthdays

On this day, April 16, in 1972, Tracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Her father was an engineer who worked on NASA’s Hubble space telescope, and she wrote her 2011 volume of poetry, Life on Mars, as a tribute to his work – that collection went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship, and her 2015 memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. From 2017 to 2019 she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, and in 2018 she began hosting the podcast and radio program The Slowdown, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. Today, she turns 49.

Birthdays

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.