For more than 2,400 years, The Histories by Herodotus has been a foundation block of Western civilization, the first work of history in Western literature. Written in classical Greek and [...]
Blame it on the radio By Patrick T. Reardon . That I drove my semi through motel wall. . That bomb went off in grocery cart. . That I sowed [...]
A single paragraph about two-thirds of the way through the book exemplifies the strength and clarity of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of [...]
Technically, Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James is a pastiche inasmuch as it’s a literary work, written in the style of another author, in this case, Jane Austen, that [...]
Okay, Alison Umminger had me at the title. I’d read her witty little essay in Fast Funny Women, a book of witty little essays, edited by Gina Barreca. I liked [...]
On the very first page of The Pearl, John Steinbeck signals that this short, tense novel is a parable. In the context of the story, he explains that it is [...]
As Sandra Cisneros’s new gem-like novella Martita, I Remember You opens, Corina is using a scraper and a blowtorch to strip generations of varnish off a dining room hutch in [...]
Corina is eating her sandwich in the sculpture garden of the Art Institute across the street from the gas company office where she works. A sparrow flits down near her [...]
W. E. B. Du Bois, the brilliant Black scholar and one of the most consequential Americans of the 20th century, operated on an international stage where many people had a [...]
Near the very end of J. L. Carr’s exquisite short novel A Month in the Country, Moon finds the missing 400-year-old grave where, all along, he knew it would be. [...]
