By the time he was twenty-nine, Charles Darwin had puzzled his way toward two-thirds of his theory of natural selection. He understood that plants and animals passed traits (hair color, say, or beak shape, or flower scent) down to their offspring. And he understood that those traits were not passed down perfectly. We resemble our …
What Strange Paradise is a short, quiet book. It’s about a boy who washes up on an unnamed Western island, the sole survivor of a migrant shipwreck, and about his life before and after that moment. More than that, it’s about home, that word the novelist Naguib Mahfouz once defined as not the place you …
This week we honored Jonathan Evison with a PNBA Award for his novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. (It’s PNBA Award #2 for Evison, who won last year for West of Here.) Today, he kicks off six weeks of essays by our 2013 winners with a well-argued case for real books. Let’s disambiguate right off …
