Italy

Flash Review – Us by David Nicholls

Us David Nicholls HarperCollins Publishers Release Date: October 28, 2014 ISBN 978-0-06-236558-3 Douglas Petersen is fifty-four years old, a biochemist by trade who had left the laboratory some years ago to become the head of Research and Development for a large corporation. He has a beautiful, artistic wife and a […]

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

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 […]

Birthdays

On this day, June 11, in 1572, Ben Jonson was born in Westminster, London, England. A towering figure in English (and therefore Western) literature, especially during the Renaissance and Restoration, he is considered second only to William Shakespeare (whom he knew) in his importance to British drama. Indeed, known for his intellect and cultured satire found in both his plays and his poetry, he was more widely known and better received than Shakespeare, and enjoyed the patronage of King James VI and I. The man who has been called the first poet laureate continued to write up until his death in 1637; he was 65.

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.