intrigue

LitStack Review – Icon by Genevieve Valentine

Icon Genevieve Valentine Saga Press Release Date: June 28, 2016 ISBN 978-1-4814-2515-5 ~ * ~ Welcome to diplomacy. Adapt or die. There is something about Genevieve Valentine’s writing that I find… incredibly fetching. While many authors compose stellar narratives and strikingly compelling prose, she is one of the few who […]

Author Vince Flynn Dies at 47

The literary community lost a great talent when Vince Flynn died on Wednesday after a 2-1/2 year battle with prostate cancer. But for those of us who live in the Twin Cities, the loss of the man is every bit as hard as the loss of the author. Not only […]

LitStack’s Featured Author Review: Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal

Glamour in Glass Mary Robinette Kowal First Edition: April 2012 Tor Books ISBN 978-0-7653-2561-7 —♦— In Glamour in Glass, author Mary Robinette Kowal takes the main characters from her delightful Regency novel Shades of Milk and Honey and, with Jane Austen still as her patron saint, leads them into uncharted […]

Birthdays

On this day, May 17, in 1939, Gary Paulsen was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of numerous YA coming of age/wilderness tales (Hatchet, Escape from Fire Mountain, Dogsong) didn’t meet his own father, a career military officer, until he and his mother moved to the Philippines when he was seven years old (they returned to the US two years later). At 14 he ran away to join the carnival to escape his alcoholic parents; he struggled himself with alcoholism but simplified his life to keep his demons at bay. In 1983, at age 44, he and his team of dogs ran the 1,150 mile Iditarod Sled Dog Race in Alaska which he wrote about in the gripping Winterdance; he later had to abandon the sport due to heart issues. Today, he turns 82.

Birthdays

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.