The Simple Truth About the Stories We Tell
Of all the quotes about hope and despair out there, Maira Kalman’s captures my current mood: “We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair..."
Tales of Motherhood From an Unlikely Source
How a walk in the forest helped me adjust to the teen years
Lessons of Life From a Desert Rose
It takes three to four weeks for the thirty-two pink petals of the damask rose to open, and the closer it gets, the more its scent fills...
Of Course It Hurts
A new translation of the poem by Swedish novelist and poet Karin Boye (1900–1941)
A Ukrainian Beekeeper in the War Zone
A Review of Andrey Kurkov's Grey Bees The act of reading any novel is a personal experience. Joyce Carol Oates describes it as slipping...
How Tolstoy Influenced Mahatma Gandhi
The One-Year Correspondence That Would Change the Course of History After the reports of the atrocities in Bucha and Mariupol, I had a...
What Putin Gets Wrong About Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the Russian Soul
To understand how Russian President Vladimir Putin could so dramatically miscalculate the reaction to his invasion of Ukraine, one must...
Literary Quotes About Life, Love and War by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
It is an understatement to say that much has been written about the differences between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: Homer vs. Shakespeare,...
Welcome to Nadine Bjursten's Website
Hello, I'm Nadine. This is less a blog and more an irregular compilation of disparate etchings, mostly about the mini worlds that I have...