Patrick T. Reardon

BettyJoyce Nash’s crackerjack novel Everybody Here Is Kin has been described as a coming-of-age tale, but that’s only half of it.  It’s also a coping-with-PTSD-after-military-service story.  And, really, it’s a [...]

In the seven stories in Ana Castillo’s new sparkling, gritty and compassionate collection Dona Cleanwell Leaves Home, there are a lot of common themes.  Ghosts, for one, including a beautiful [...]

Over the past 76 years, the Playtex brand of bras, girdles and other women’s products hasn’t been shy when it comes to advertising its merchandise.  In fact, in 1949, it [...]

Mark K. Tilsen, a poet and Native-American activist, grew up reading a copy of Voices from Wounded Knee, 1973 that “was coffee-stained and was falling apart by the time I [...]

Laura Lippman’s 2018 novel Sunburn is a mystery and a crime novel, but it’s more of a character study. The characters are Adam Bosk and Pauline Hansen, once known as [...]

Even success can be boring, it seems.  That’s a good explanation for Agatha Christie’s 1942 murder mystery Five Little Pigs. At this point, in the middle of the 20th century, [...]

Michael Edwards is an English-born French poet and scholar, and he argues that it’s important to recognize that much of the Bible is written as poetry or as poetic prose, [...]