In her new book of poetry Woman without Shame, Sandra Cisneros looks aging in the face and laughs.  She laughs at the frenetic lusts and couplings of youth — at broken hearts and confusions. She thumbs her nose at her prudish Catholic upbringing and, lovingly, at her prudish Catholic mother.  She embraces herself and giggles. …

In the epilogue of her astute, significant and multi-dimensional Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer focuses on the work of sculptor Teodoro Ramos Blanco. She writes that, during the course of a long career, Ramos Blanco “created monuments to many people who have appeared in the pages of this book,” including: Placido, the poet and…

At some point, near the end of Hubert Monteilhet’s The Praying Mantises, one character says to another: “You’re the worst of the three of us.” That’s saying a lot.  By this point, the reader knows just how cruel, amoral, conniving and evil all three of the book’s central characters are. Which is to say the…

I’m not sure how old I was when I first read Andre Norton’s 1952 novel Daybreak 2250 AD.  In an essay about the book that I wrote for the Chicago Tribune six years ago, I said I was 10.  Now, though, I’m thinking that I might have been 11 or 12. I know that I…

African American lovers Beatrice Verdene Chapel and Jim Waters are the central characters in Jasmine Elizabeth Smith’s anguished, violent, blues-infused poetry collection South Flight, published by the University of Georgia Press. In “Love Letter on the Eve of Revolution,” Jim is writing to Beatrice as he is getting ready to escape the everyday murderous white…

Armand Degas — a middle-aged Ojibway-French Canadian, also known as Blackbird, also known to his increasing irritation as Bird — waits for another chicken pot pie to bake while Donna clears the table and tidies up the kitchen.  Donna Mulry is a 50-year-old former prison guard who has been providing a home and her bed…

In the 1955 novel Murder in the Navy, the killer is an evil presence operating in the shadows.  But he’s not hidden from the reader, even though his name isn’t known until the very end. In the opening scene and at several other points in the book, the reader is taken inside the killer’s mind. …