David Ciminello’s 2024 novel The Queen of Steeplechase Park is a wild and wacky foul-mouthed fantasy about free-spirit Belladonna Marie Donato and her circle of boundary-breaking friends in the tight, [...]
Table By Patrick T. Reardon Let the sparrow take a chair at the Juneteeth table with Elijah, with Godot, with the lost tribes and the communion of saints and [...]
For Gaza's Children is a scream of protest against the oppression of Palestinians by those who have suffered oppression themselves. It is a cry from the heart against the destruction, [...]
Bai Juyi and his best friend Yuan Zhen, Chinese poets twelve hundred years ago, promoted a revival of folk culture, known as the New Music Bureau Movement. The Music Bureau [...]
On the title page of David Mamet’s 2018 book, it says: Chicago: A Novel. It would have been more accurate to say: Chicago: A Myth. The book, well-written and well-paced, [...]
It wasn’t happenstance, I think, that Sidney Callahan’s The Magnificat: The Prayer of Mary and Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin [...]
Sigmund Freud once said that, if you take a widely diverse set of people and starve them, soon all their differences will fall away to be replaced by “the uniform [...]
I’m tempted to say that Lisa Russ Spaar’s novel Paradise Close has a fairy-tale quality to it, but I’m afraid that would give the wrong idea. That might suggest that [...]
In April, 2014, right after Terry Pratchett’s 40th Discworld novel Raising Steam was published in the U.S., I read it and reviewed it on my website. And loved it. Now, [...]
Seven years after Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize, she published Twilight Sleep which tells the same story from a different perspective. In both novels, the [...]
