Nightwise

Litstack Rec: The Refugees: Stories & Nightwise

The Refugees: Stories, by Viet Thanh Nguyen May is Short Story Month, a great time to celebrate the short story, and the perfect opportunity to share some favorite Litstack recs of story collections, contemporary and classic. If you’re a fan of The Sympathizer, Viet Nguyen’s debut novel that won the […]

LitStack Recs: Green Thoughts & Nightwise

Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, by Eleanor Perényi If you’re a writer who gardens, Eleanor Perényi writes in her foreword, “sooner or later you’re going to write a book about the subject—I take that as inevitable.” And indeed, there are some heavy-hitting precedents to Pereyni’s classic of the […]

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.