It’s going to be a pretty short Gimbling in the Wabe this week, not because I’ve suddenly lost my gift of gab, or had an epiphany that brevity really is the soul of wit. It’s because what I feel like addressing is quite simple. It started with a sudden hoopla […]
Recently, the Boston based magazine The Atlantic ran an interesting article entitled Women Rise in Sci Fi (Again) with the tag line, “This year’s major science-fiction awards had strong female representation, but don’t call it a feminist victory for the genre just yet.” In it, they interviewed writers Ann Leckie (author […]
The books closest to our hearts become a part of us. We love them for various reasons, and when a story is great, we tend to gravitate toward its author. Their worlds speak to us. Their characters resonate with us. And while it’s true that even our favorite authors and […]
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.