Universal Harvester John Darnielle Ferrar, Straus and Giroux Release Date: February 7, 2017 ISBN 978-0-37428-210-3 Full disclosure: I grew up in Iowa, so John Darnielle’s new novel Universal Harvester has home field advantage in a play for my loyalty. After all, I already knew that Nevada, Iowa is pronounced Neh-VEY-dah, […]
The Girl on the Train Paula Hawkins Riverhead Books Release Date: January 13, 2015 ISBN 978-1-59463-366-9 Rachel Watson may not have hit rock bottom yet, but she’s pretty darned close. Her husband Tom divorced her after having an affair and then marrying “the other woman”. She had started drinking back […]
Some Kind of Fairy Tale Graham Joyce Doubleday/Anchor Publication Date: July 2, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-385-53578-6 Yet another World Fantasy Awards – Best Novel nominee, and yet another wonderful story. Many, many folk tales, fireside stories, elder manuscripts and vestiges of ancient lore tell of the abduction of (usually) fair young […]
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.