The summer of 2020 is unlike those past—no traveling, no baseball games, limited beach and park time, if any, and none of the barbecues and gatherings under the sun that so define our idea of summer. With that in mind, here are some summer-themed reads, escapes reminiscent of summers past […]
Cutting Teeth, by Julia Fierro For those who have young children, there’s a lovely innocence to summer—its sprinklers and days at the beach, its long days and late evenings. Julia Fierro’s debut novel, Cutting Teeth, captures that sense of fleeting summer pleasure, as well as the pleasures and the challenges […]
Cutting Teeth, by Julia Fierro When October comes, I’m always caught off guard by how quickly summer has gone. Afternoons at the beach or by the lake already feel distant. For parents especially, summer vanishes in the transition of back to school—but as the summers pass, you come to miss […]
When I was young, we were not allowed to swear. Nor to take the name of the Lord in vain. It wasn’t just profane words, not just swear words, but ugly words, too. We weren’t allowed to say “crap.” Or “geeze” (too much like “Jesus”, I guess). So for years, […]
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.