When you think of it, sending a letter in the mail is a small act of hope.  It’s the same sending a text or an email. You compose your message and then commit it to a process that, you believe and hope, will end with it being read by the person to whom you are…

The softcover edition of John W. Thomason Jr.’s Gone to Texas is visually striking but, in the manner of many paperbacks, misleading.  Nevertheless, it turned out to be misleading in a good way since it got me into Thomason’s western and, even more, into his own remarkable art of the West, much different from the…

Sometime last September, I happened upon a musical called The Wild Party — book, music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa — being performed by the Blank Theatre Company on a small commercial street on the Far North Side of Chicago. It was a fun show, a muscular and frenetic melodrama, set in a 1920s New…

Joshua Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with the judges hailing it as “a mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile…

Nearly half a century ago, Joanna Russ published The Female Man, a creative, passionate and prescient science fiction novel, as a commentary on the constrained lives of women in human society. It is a novel filled with bitter humor and spiky insights that focuses on four women, existing in alternate realities, who meet and become…

After a stint as an assistant editor in the Time magazine Chicago bureau, Clair Huffaker began his book-writing career, publishing one novelization of a movie (Cowboy) and eight short western novels of his own between 1957 and 1959. That’s a lot of writing or, at least, a lot of publishing in a short amount of…

Two-thirds of the way through her insightful and thought-provoking new book The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 336 pages, $29.95), English literature scholar Marion Turner is writing about Shakespeare’s Falstaff. The attractively comic knight — a major character in the plays Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and The Merry…

Cotton Hawes, the new guy among the 87th Precinct detectives, sleeps his way through Killer’s Payoff. I don’t mean he’s asleep while the action takes place.  He’s in the middle of the action, you might say.  That’s because, at virtually every turn in Ed McBain’s 1958 novel, Cotton is falling in love with — and…

On the first page of Frederick Busch’s 1991 novel Closing Arguments, Mark Brennan writes that he is telling the reader of the upstate lawyer, the post-traumatic combat stress, the splendid wife, their solitudes and infidelities, their children, his client with her awkward affinities, the sense of impending recognition by which he is haunted.  So, right…