Jess Walter

LitStack Recs: Blue Nights & Beautiful Ruins

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion Joan Didion is an author I’ve long revered, whose books have had a titanic effect on me. But when Blue Nights came out in 2011, I couldn’t bring myself to read it. The memoir is a counterpart to Didion’s 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical […]

Goodread’s Choice Awards 2012

Published by : TS Tate

As the year approaches an end, readers, and Goodreads members, are now given the opportunity to vote on their favorite books of 2012. “Choose the best books of the year with three rounds of voting. The Goodreads Choice Awards are the only major book awards decided by readers.” The following […]

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.