It’s the birthday of Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (1930-2013, #nicelonglifebutmaybenotlongenough), who began writing about Africa after becoming disillusioned in college about the novels that white authors were writing about Africa. His best-known novel is Things Fall Apart (1958), about the devastating effects of British colonialism on tribal Africa. The novel has been translated into 45 [...]
It’s the birthday of British-born ethnically-Hungarian author Tibor Fischer (b. 1959), whose debut novel, Under the Frog (1992), made a Big Huge Literary Splash and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, after the novel had been rejected by 56 publishers who are even now probably still kicking themselves. (Let’s all pause to enjoy imagining that.) [...]
It’s the birthday of the woman who wrote: On the outskirts of a tiny little town was a neglected garden. In the garden stood an old house, and in that house lived Pippi Longstocking. She was nine years old, and she lived there all alone. She had no mother or father, which was [...]
It’s the birthday of Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894, #diedtooyoung), best known for his novel Treasure Island (1881) and novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and for being one of the authors featured in the Authors Card Game that some of us grew up playing in the 70s. Stevenson [...]
It’s the birthday of the Confessional poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974, #diedtooyoung), who began writing poetry seriously as a way to cope with mental illness and who became one of America’s most respected poets, winning the Pulitzer in 1967 for her volume, Live or Die. Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and had an unhappy (and [...]
It’s the birthday of Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 (back when they were still awarding those) and who is best known for the novel The Remains of the Day (1989), narrated by the quintessential English butler, Stevens, as he looks back on his life and his [...]
It’s the birthday of the French author Albert Camus (1913-1960, #diedtooyoung), best known for his novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947) and for his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he founded the philosophy of Absurdism, which asserts that humans should persistently search for meaning in an inherently meaningless world, which is [...]
It’s the birthday of two Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists, Colson Whitehead (b. 1969) and Michael Cunningham (b. 1952); today we talk about Whitehead, whose 2016 alternative history novel The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and was a #1 New York Times bestseller. The Underground Railroad [...]
It’s the birthday of playwright and actor Sam Shepard (1943-2017), whose plays explored the concept of the American West in new and “hallucinatory” ways in which “the only undeniable truth is that of the mirage” (Ben Brantley, “Sam Shepard, Actor and Pulitzer-Winning Playwright, Is Dead at 73,” NY Times, July 31, 2017). He wrote over [...]
Today is November 1st, the first day of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, in which participants are challenged to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month. That comes to about 1,667 words a day, or 6.67 typed pages a day—which qualifies as insanely fast writing, especially when sustained over a 30-day period. [...]
It’s the birthday of the great lyric poet who wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” (To which math and science reply, “Preach.” See an interesting article on this here.) John Keats (1795-1821) was born in London, the oldest of four. His father ran [...]
It’s the birthday of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), known as one of the greatest novelists in history and one of the greatest influences on all of 20th century literature. (You may know him from such works as Crime and Punishment, 1866; The Idiot, 1869; and The Brothers Karamazov, 1880.) Considered one of the most brilliant psychological [...]