The Places In-Between, Rory Stewart In 2002, Rory Stewart made a walk across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul. A scholar of Afghan history and language, he was well grounded the country’s ancient history, and in the grave first years after 9/11, sought to learn “what [Afghanistan] was like now.” Part […]
The life of fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien will be the subject of an upcoming movie, giving fans a glimpse into the mind that imagined the wonderfully complex fictional worlds of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. According to the Los Angeles Times, the biopic will look at the late British writer’s life story […]
From The Huffington Post: J.R.R. Tolkien, the highly revered author of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “The Hobbit,” has a new book coming out next spring. This may seem peculiar given that the writer died in 1973, but British publisher HarperCollins has confirmed that the unseen “The Fall […]
Steven Lloyd Wilson, Associate Editor of the website Pajiba, uses Tolkien as a jumping off point to explore how some authors such as George RR Martin, Joe Abercrombie and Jacqueline Carey have taken the idea of “the Epic” and moved it in a different direction. In the short but sweet […]
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.