“The past is a pebble in my shoe.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Ah, life. It is fascinating. Life stories are fascinating. Sometimes, putting aside a writer’s manuscripts and looking at their “mundane”, real world life proves to be as fascinating as the stories they tell. Take Edgar Allan Poe. I’ve […]
Great fiction is meant to inspire. That may not, perhaps, be the agenda of the novelist at the outset of writing, but when one is discussing topics that seem out of the social norm or that demonstrates the act of subverting common convention, then inspiration is inevitable. Subverting what is […]
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.