North Carolina

A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash

A Land More Kind Than Home Wiley Cash William Morrow Paperbacks Release Date: January 22, 2013 ISBN 978-0-06-208814-7 —♦— Debut novels shouldn’t be this good. They just shouldn’t. In his first novel, Wiley Cash draws on his rural North Carolina upbringing to weave a story both touching and tragic. Using […]

Stephen King's New Novel 'Joyland' Revealed

From The Huffington Post: Stephen King’s publishers have released details of his next book. Case Crime, the award-winning line of pulp-styled crime novels published by Titan Books, has said it will publish Joyland in June 2013. Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story […]

Birthdays

On this day, August 11, in 1921, Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York. He was author of the 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a fictionalized account of his own family’s history, for which he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize. One year later, the book was made into the popular television miniseries, “Roots”, which was seen by a record breaking 130 million viewers. He also was the ghostwriter for The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He died of a heart attack in 1992; he was 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.