recipe – L i t S t a c k

Gimbling in the Wabe – Making Sausage

In last week’s 2nd Annual NerdCon: Stories convention, held at the Minneapolis Convention Center, I attended a panel discussion entitled “Sotto Voce: Finding Your Voice”. Many of the panelists talked about staying true to yourself, searching for your true voice, and the difficulty that sometimes arises when you find yourself […]

Gimbling in the Wabe – Adding Hominy to That

Yesterday, I had to do something that was quite sad – I had to call and cancel our subscription to the local newspaper. Due to unexpected financial stresses, we simply can’t afford to have the daily paper delivered any longer. I thought about keeping the Sunday paper, because I do […]

Birthdays

On this day, July 23, in 1971, Mohsin Hamid was born in Lahore, Pakistan to a family of Punjabi and Kashmiri descent. He spent some younger years in the US, and returned to attend Princeton where he studied under Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison (the first draft of his novel, Moth Smoke, was penned for a fiction workshop taught by Morrison). Although his career was in management and brand consulting, he always dedicated time to writing. All of his novels, which along with Moth Smoke includes The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and 2017’s Exit West, have been well received and duly honored. Now splitting his time between London and Lahore, today he turns 50.

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.