As Car Trouble opens, it’s one a.m., and the novel’s young protagonist, Nicky Flynn, is driving backwards through the streets of Brooklyn in a Chevy Impala. The car, nicknamed the Blue Max, operates only in reverse, due to a jammed gearshift, and belongs to his impulsive father, Patrick. Patrick, who […]
Last year, in our Emerging Author segment, we had the pleasure of interviewing Phoebe North, whose debut novel, Starglass has just been released. Recently, I sat down with Phoebe to discuss the first installment of her YA SciFi duology, her experience as a newly published author and what she hopes […]
Starglass Phoebe North Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers ISBN-10: 1442459530 My thirteen-year-old daughter is a book worm. She’s like her mom, willing to fully immerse herself in a story, to dip down deep into imagined worlds and let the lyric of language and setting carry her away from […]
Director Chris Columbus, who has helmed such Hollywood blockbusters as “Home Alone” and the first two “Harry Potter” films has tackled publishing. In a blog post with The Huffington Post, Columbus says his debut novel, co-written with Ned Vizzini, was something that he’s tinkered with for over a decade: The […]
The Year of the Gadfly Jennifer Miller Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN 978-0-547-54859-3 —♦— Fourteen-year-old Iris Dupont lost her best friend to suicide. She struggles to deal with this reality, so in an effort to help Iris move on, her parents move the family from Boston to the small New England […]
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.