Book review: “The Waters” by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Picture this: Six goofily regular guys in the middle of the night are stumbling neck-deep in a turbid bog, called the Waters, in a stumblebum effort to carry Rose Thorn [...]
Poem: Voice
Voice Patrick T. Reardon . Hear my voice. Hide me. He underwent translation, like a poem set afire, like a slashed Madonna and Child. Sword tongue and bitter salad. River [...]
Book review: “How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit” by Witold Rybczynski
The subtitle of a book can be distracting, enlightening and, at times, misleading. My sense — for what it’s worth — is that the author may come up with the [...]
Book review: “Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man” by Peter K. Andersson
William Somer was Henry VIII’s fool. He also served in some capacity in or on the edge of the court during the reigns of Henry’s children: Edward VI, the sickly [...]
Poem: Jagged
Jagged Patrick T. Reardon The shoeless guy sleeping on the McDonald’s bench along the north windows is the god of still waters. The unfocused one, rocking over his [...]
Book review: “Blake: A Biography” by Peter Ackroyd
Laboring in obscurity two centuries ago, William Blake is now considered one of the great figures of English poetry and a brilliant idiosyncratic visual artist. The story of his life, [...]
Essay: Listening with a hearing heart
Back in the 1950s, there was a TV series called The Millionaire. The idea was that, each week, a rich guy would give away $1 million to someone he’d never [...]
Poem: In those years
In those years Patrick T. Reardon In those years, everyone at the paper knew the name of the Cook County Coroner. Knew what could be written and not. [...]
Book review: “Fiddlers” by Ed McBain
On July 6, 2005, Evan Hunter died of laryngeal cancer at the age of 78 at his Weston, Connecticut home. He was called Salvatore Lombino at birth. Later, he legally [...]
Book review: “Son of Nobody” by Yann Martel
What was Yann Martel thinking? I’m talking about the title of his new novel Son of Nobody, a double-barreled story of a lost epic about the Trojan War and of [...]