Leslie Jamison

LitStaff Recs: The Empathy Exams & Three Parts Dead

The Empathy Exams: Essays, by Leslie Jamison The Empathy Exams blends memoir, literary, cultural and moral investigation, and its essays are rich, astute, and candid. This is Jamison’s second book (following a 2011 novel The Gin Closet), winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize that went on to the New […]

LitStack Recs: The Empathy Exams & The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy

The Empathy Exams: Essays, by Leslie Jamison 2014 is being called the year of the essay, due to the extraordinary stream of collections it has brought — Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable among them—showing the personal essay in a range of styles and voices […]

Birthdays

On this day, May 6, in 1861, Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta, India. A poet, writer, composer and painter, he reshaped the literature and music of the Bengali region of what was then-colonial India. Supporting independence, espousing humanism and embracing simplicity, he turned his back on the rigid traditions and forms in Indian literature; his own works were celebrated for being both idealistic and accessible while still beautifully lyrical. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; he was knighted in 1917 but repudiated it two years later in protest of British actions in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He died in 1941, at age 80.

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.