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 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.