Patrick T. Reardon

I’m the sort who, when reading a novel, looks for the title in the text.  Sometimes, it’s not there, but, often, I can find it.  And, usually, its placement in [...]

In 1989, Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about a British butler, was published to great acclaim and great sales.  The book was soon turned into a highly praised [...]

Teddy Carella is the hero of Ed McBain’s fourth 87th Precinct novel The Con Man, published in 1957. Teddy — Theodora — was born without the ability to speak and [...]

Elmore Leonard’s novel Split Images opens in this grim way: In the winter of 1981 a multimillionaire by the name of Robinson Daniels shot a Haitian refugee who had broken [...]

At the center of Thomas R. Nevin’s revelatory, deeply felt and actively contemplative 2013 study The Last Years of Saint Therese: Doubt and Darkness, 1895-1897 are nearly two dozen sentences [...]

Early in the first in-depth examination of bravura in art, Nicola Suthor, a professor of art history at Yale, tells the story of Raphael and Michelangelo meeting on the street. [...]

Fred Waitzkin’s 2019 novella Deep Water Blues has the feel of someone leisurely telling a simple modern-day sea saga about betrayal, violence and sharks amid a tropical paradise of cobalt [...]

Robert Stassi, a Methodist minister with two master’s degrees and a Ph. D., is explaining the exterminator business to the new recruit.  Stassi is called The Most Dangerous Man because [...]

In 1971, Linda Nochlin wrote her groundbreaking ARTnews essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” as a manifesto of the new feminist art history, challenging millenniums of art-field [...]

It strikes me as odd that the last of Ralph Hale Mottram’s many books was The Twentieth Century: A Personal Record, published in 1969, two years before he died at the [...]