Haven Kimmel’s 2001 memoir A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana is a rollickingly funny entertainment about the childhood of a strange child in a strange family [...]
If Emily Dickinson had had a sense of humor, she might have written "A Girl Named Zippy." And if she'd been born in 1965 in Indiana. That's when and where [...]
The lost tribes, part 4 By Patrick T. Reardon . We are lost in Viagra’d beds, in sticky, spilled orange sidewalk pop, in black sidewalk gum, in sidewalk blood, in [...]
It is a telling irony that Lucy Parsons — one of the most famous African-American women in Chicago’s history — pretended she wasn’t black. Not only that. According to historian [...]
Elizabeth Wetmore’s Valentine, set in rural West Texas in 1976, is a novel of relentless and brutally raw outrage, a fury-filled howl of women caught in a life and a [...]
For students of westerns — or writing of any sort — the first forty pages of Elmore Leonard’s Last Stand at Saber River are a masterful exhibition of how [...]
Terry Pratchett — who died in 2015 at the age of 66 from Alzheimer’s — played for keeps. His 41 Discworld fantasy novels are the height of playfulness. [...]
There is the maddening mystery at the heart of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock — the disappearance of three teen girls and a teacher during a [...]
Reading Neil Harris’s Chicago Apartments: A Century and Beyond of Lakefront Luxury, the newly published and expanded second edition of his 2004 book, it’s clear that the relatively modest [...]
In the first two sentences of Anna Dowdall’s 2017 novel After the Winter, I learned that Sally Ryder had had a very unexpected letter and then had gotten grim [...]
