In September 2010, author and all around goddess Mary Robinette Kowal (The Glamourist Histories, Ghost Talkers) took a month off from the internet. During her vacation, she told people that they could correspond with her by paper letter. “It was fun,” she wrote, “so in 2011, I issued the […]
So, when I took the parcel I was going to send out for the first day of the 2016 A Month of Letters Challenge to the local post office, I was the 10th or 11th person in line. There was only one person working at the counter, and she was […]
I promise, I won’t make this a diatribe on the lack of personalization in society today, nor will I bemoan the loss of the art of letter writing, or even shed a tear at the passing of cursive writing. That’s something my grandmother would do, and even though I loved […]
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.