Presenting another installment celebrating #NationalPoetryMonth: my name on his tongue, by Laila Halaby Laila Halaby’s, my name on his tongue, her first book of poetry, published in 2012, mines issues of identity, geography and the dislocation that comes from inhabiting two worlds. Halaby, the author of two novels and the […]
Thunderstruck & Other Stories, by Elizabeth McCracken Early on in Elizabeth McCracken’s extraordinary story collection, Thunderstruck, a grieving mother instructs her seventeen year-old son to seal up the room of his dead sister. This, she imagines will somehow purge the house of the evil that caused her daughter’s lymphoma. “Don’t […]
Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy Jules Tygiel Oxford University Press, 1983 ISBN 0-19-503300-0 In 1987, the Minnesota Twins won the World Series. During that pennant fever, I jumped on baseball’s bandwagon and never jumped off. I have deep seated memories of the sport from my youth: listening […]
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.