Sometimes, the hardest thing about writing a weekly column is coming up with a good idea.Often for me, ideas seem to appear just in the nick of time – ta dah! – giving me just enough slack to delve into the topic but not enough time to allow it to […]
This one just makes us sad. From The Huffington Post: The historic Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore, which lost its longtime curator and was shuttered in September amid an operational reorganization, has in the last month been defaced by graffiti and robbed of its wooden front steps, […]
It’s a difficult task, narrowing down the novels that have impacted your life into a small, somewhat abstract list. For many of us, reading a novel, a well written novel, is more than a task set to those merely interested in reading a good book. The novels in this […]
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.