Patrick Reardon

There are two original sins in P.D. James’s 1994 Original Sin. One is central to the mystery.  The other is a mournful shadow of history. The story also features the [...]

Salman Rushdie’s 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories is joyous, inventive, delightful, funny, fun, enticing, stimulating, dazzling and playful. It opens with a sentence about “a sad city, [...]

Less than two years ago, novelist Salman Rushdie was the victim of a stabbing attack that left him near death. His newly published nonfiction book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted [...]

The Book of Ruth is hardly a book, just four chapters, totaling a bit over 2,600 words. Nonetheless, the story is, writes Illana Pardes, “the most elaborate tale of a [...]

Wee Mad Arthur, terribly short and terribly powerful, is a funny character in Terry Pratchett’s fantasy Discworld which is a planet flat as a pancake and, so, pretty much by [...]

Two sisters, both around thirty, sit uneasily across from each other in a restaurant — Sarah, wife, mother, seamstress, and Glennie, an obstetrician-gynecologist married to her career. Six years ago, [...]

What, no sociopaths? Well, A Coyote’s in the House is, after all, a book for children. But, above all, it is a novel by Elmore Leonard who specializes in stories [...]