Midnight sun

The midnight sun is a natural phenomenon that occurs in the local summer months in places north of the Arctic Circle or south of the Antarctic Circle, when the sun remains visible at the local midnight. Around the summer solstice (approximately 21 June in the north and 22 December in the south) the sun is visible for the full 24 hours, given fair weather. The number of days per year with potential midnight sun increases the farther towards either pole one goes. Although approximately defined by the polar circles, in practice the midnight sun can be seen as much as 55 miles (90 km) outside the polar circle, as described below, and the exact latitudes of the farthest reaches of midnight sun depend on topography and vary slightly year-to-year.

There are no permanent economically autonomous human settlements south of the Antarctic Circle, only research stations, so the countries and territories whose populations experience it are limited to those crossed by the Arctic Circle: Canada (Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut), Greenland, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States (Alaska). A quarter of Finland's territory lies north of the Arctic Circle and at the country's northernmost point the sun does not set at all for 60 days during summer. In Svalbard, Norway, the northernmost inhabited region of Europe, there is no sunset from approximately 19 April to 23 August. The extreme sites are the poles where the sun can be continuously visible for a half year.

Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá

Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (born October 9, 1946) is a Puerto Rican essayist and novelist.

Biography

Rodríguez Juliá was born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. In 1974, he published the first of his eight novels, La renuncia del héroe Baltasar. In 1986 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literature. Since 1999 he has been a member of the Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española. In June 2011, he lectured at the University of Guadalajara's "Julio Cortázar" Center for the Study of American Literature. In April 2012 he gave the Raimundo Lira Lecture at Harvard University.

Bibliography

Midnight Sun (novel)

Midnight Sun is an unreleased companion novel to the book Twilight by author Stephenie Meyer. The work retells the events of Twilight, but is written from the perspective of Edward Cullen instead of that of the series' usual narrating character Bella Swan. Meyer stated that Twilight was to be the only book from the series that she planned to rewrite from Edward's perspective. To give them a better feel of Edward's character, Meyer allowed Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the film adaptation of Twilight, and Robert Pattinson, the actor playing Edward, to read some completed chapters of the novel while they shot the film.

Pre-release history

On August 28, 2008, Meyer halted the writing of Midnight Sun in response to the leak of twelve chapters of the unfinished manuscript on the Internet. She stated, "If I tried to write Midnight Sun now, in my current frame of mind, James would probably win and all the Cullens would die, which wouldn't dovetail too well with the original story. In any case, I feel too sad about what has happened to continue working on Midnight Sun, and so it is on hold indefinitely." She made the twelve-chaptered draft available on her website in fairness to her readers, now that the novel has been compromised before its intended publication date. Meyer also stated that she doesn't believe the manuscript was leaked with any malicious intent, and would not give any names.