Laila Halaby

LitStack Rec: my name on his tongue & Hild

my name on his tongue, by Laila Halaby In the climate of inflamed rhetoric about immigrants that has predominated in this election year, a small, quiet book like Laila Halaby’s my name on his tongue can speak volumes. In her first book of poetry, published in 2012, Halaby mines issues […]

LitStack Recs: my name on his tongue & Never Let Me Go

my name on his tongue, by Laila Halaby In her first book of poetry, published in 2012, Halaby mines issues of identity, geography and the dislocation that comes from inhabiting two worlds. Halaby, the author of two novels, and recipient of a PEN/Beyond Margins Award, calls this volume a memoir […]

Birthdays

On this day, March 5, in 1952, Margaret Astrid Lindholm (better known under the pen names of Robin Hobb and Megan Lindholm) was born in Berkeley, California. As Robin Hobb, she is the author many works of epic traditional fantasy, including The Farseer Trilogy (which began with Assassin’s Apprentice), The Liveship Traders Trilogy, and the Tawny Man Trilogy. She also writes as Megan Lindholm, and her works under that name have been finalists for the Hugo award, the Nebula Award and the Endeavor award. She has won an Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Readers’ Award twice, and in 2014 she was a Guest of Honor at the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention in London. Today, she turns 69.

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.