High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel George R. R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, editors Tor Books Release Date: August 30, 2016 ISBN 978-0-7653-3562-3 In 1983, author George R. R. Martin was given a birthday gift: SuperWorld, a roleplaying game. For two years, he and his Albuquerque gaming circle obsessed […]
Borrowed Horses Siân Griffiths New Rivers Press Release Date: October 29, 2013 ISBN 978-0-89823-284-4 The last time I rode a horse, it was at my friend Linda’s hobby farm a few hours north of Minneapolis. It was a pleasant day, riding through the countryside, alongside the corn fields, through the […]
Beautiful Ruins Jess Walter HarperCollins Publishers First Edition – June 12, 2012 ISBN 978-0-06-192812-3 — ♦ — Towards the end of Jess Walter’s lovely new novel, Beautiful Ruins, one of the characters muses as the world is unraveling around him that life, despite all its shortcomings, is a “glorious catastrophe”. It is […]
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.