【推荐1】A few years after Mom died, Dad showed up for lunch wearing the soft smile that took over his face whenever he was thinking about her. “I’ve found these,” he said, handing me a bag. “She would have wanted you to have them.”

I opened the bag to find dozens of shells, each one bearing Mom’s handwritten words: Stone Harbor, N. J. — 8-98. They were pretty common, but to Mom, they were evidence of her endlessly magical life.

She was 61 when she collected these shells, already showing signs of the lung disease that would kill her the next year. Mom needed an adventure. She loved seashore. So we decided to take her to Jersey Shore.

As soon as I said “Jersey Shore”, she started to shout over and over again— “I can’t believe I’m going to New Jersey!”

Once we got to Stone Harbor, Mom acted like the town mayor, greeting everyone as if they were loyal constituents. And she spent hours collecting shells on the beach. The morning we left, I found her photographing every corner of her bedroom. “I don’t even want to forget this,” she said.

For a long time, Mom’s shells stayed buried in a drawer. Last month, I rediscovered them. I put them where I can easily to see them. One by one, the shells are finding a new place in my home. They remind me to live a life like my mother — who never lost her sense of passion.

【推荐2】Louise Gluck has been no stranger to awards over her long and storied career, since her first publication in 1968. In 1993, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poems, The Wild Iris (《野鸢尾》). And on Oct 8 she became the 16th woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature with the Nobel prizes first awarded in 1901.

Gluck was honored “for her unmistakable poetic voice that, with austere (朴素的) beauty, makes individual existence universal”. Often said to be an autobiographical (自传体的) poet, drawing from the inner parts of her life, “she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet (告白派诗人). Gluck seeks the universal,” Nobel Committee Chair Anders Olsson said in a statement.

Gluck, 77, the author of 12 poetry collections, has been able to turn her life experiences into universal themes covering life, loss, and isolation. Because of this, readers have often found her poetry to be “dark”. However, there is much more than darkness in her voice, as noted by Olsson. “It is straightforward and ... also a voice full of humor and biting wit,” he said.

For example, in her poem Snowdrops, she uses the coming of spring after winter to show rebirth of life after death. She leads readers down a depressing path only to reconnect with the light at the near end. At the conclusion of the poem, readers are left to feel the “raw wind of the new world” as they watch a new spring. This is often the case in Gluck’s poetry, being able to feel joy even after not having done so for a long time.

When her work Faithful Virtuous Night (《忠诚与善良之夜》) received a National Book Award for Poetry in 2014, a judge for the award went on to say, the collection comes from “a world where darkness blurs (使模糊) ordinarily sharp edges (边界) around the oppositions of our lives – loss and renewal, male and female, the living and the dead”.

Although she’s already a well-known writer, experienced in exploring trauma (痛苦经历) and healing, Gluck did feel honored to be given the prestigious Nobel award. However, when asked what the prize means to her, the lyric poet responded by saying, “It’s too new … I don’t know really what it means.” Her only hope is that she can preserve her daily life.

【推荐3】John Keats was an English poet, whose poetry described the beauty of the natural world and art as the vehicle for his poetic imagination. Regarded as one of the English language’s most naturally gifted poets, John Keats wrote poetry that concentrated on imagination, human nature, and philosophy. Although Keats didn’t receive much formal literary education, his own studies and great interest brought him much success. Besides, his own life situation made a great difference to his poetry.

Growing up as a young kid in London in a lower, middle-class family, the young John didn’t attend a private school, but went to public school in Enfield, near his home. His teachers and his family’s friends regarded him as a positive boy who liked playing and fighting much more than minding his studies. After his father’s death in the early 1800s, followed by his mother’s passing away due to illness, he began to view life differently. He wanted to escape the world and did so by reading anything he could get his hands on.

At around the age of 16, John Keats began studying under a surgeon so that he too might become a doctor. However, his love for literature had taken too much of his time, especially with his addiction to the poetry of Edmund Spenser. Within two months in 1817, Keats had written an entire volume (册) of poetry that would be published, but was attacked sharply in Blackwood’s Magazine. However, it didn’t stop him.

John Keats’ next work to be published was Endymion, which he wrote in 1817 and was published in May 1818. The story tells a boy who falls in love with the moon goddess and leads him to an adventure of one boy’s hope to overcome the limitations of being human. Following Endymion, he wrote Isabella. His next work was Hyperion that would attempt to combine all he learned. However, an attack of tuberculosis (肺结核) while visiting Italy kept him from his work and took his life in 1821.