New year, new books—and these are some of the ones I’m looking forward to in 2021. My Year Abroad, by Chang-Rae Lee. I’m a fan of Lee’s stylish sentences and restrained voice, and his latest novel is the sprawling tale of a bored American college student, Tiller, and the exuberant […]
The Clothing of Books, by Jhumpa Lahiri “How do you clothe a book?” is the how this small, but powerful volume begins. For a writer whose stories are as personal and complex as Jhumpa Lahiri’s, a cover’s design presents a different set of questions. The Clothing of Books began as […]
The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri “How do you clothe a book?” is the how this small, but powerful volume begins. For a writer whose stories are as personal and complex as Jhumpa Lahiri’s, a cover’s design presents a different set of questions. The Clothing of Books began as […]
The Presidential Summer Reading List As The Hill reported last week, President Barack Obama chose six books to read during his 16-day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. Here’s a rundown. Between The World and Me, by Ta-Nahisi Coates. An educator and journalist for The Atlantic Monthly, Coates set out to write […]
William Shakespeare The Sonnets It may be a day late to pin this recommendation to the 450th anniversary of the birth and death of William Shakespeare, but I still can think of no better way to mark the end of National Poetry Month than to pause and take note of […]
Generally, I think, many of us will say that our mothers are the best ever. We’re all biased, of course, and what we learned from the mothers in our lives impacts us in ways that we won’t fully comprehend until we’re older. For most of my life, I honestly believed […]
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.