I'm not sure how Elmore Leonard's Hombre, published in 1961, reads for a young person today. It seems to me that there is something universal to it that would make the short novel interesting and even thought-provoking for a millennial --- or anyone, for that matter. Something about personal integrity. Essentially, a motley group of people, riding…

Sorrow Road is Julia Keller’s fifth novel set in fictional Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, and centered on the county prosecutor Belfa Elkins. If you want to get a sense of this series, just go about halfway into the new novel, to the point at which a couple of sheriff’s deputies have made a grisly discovery: And…

Reading George Wallace’s collection of 48 poems A Simple Blues with a Few Intangibles is a kaleidoscopic, whirligig experience. It is a rushing, often breathless torrent of images, allusions, emotions, evocations and even snippets of song lyrics — “it’s all in the game” and “trampled out the vintage” and “up against the wall Motherfucker.” There is…

Science fiction seems to be about the future, and, a lot of times, it is. Writers will grapple with the nuts and bolts of how a spacecraft might be constructed and noodle ideas about how the various laws and theories of science will hold up for people who are traversing the Universe. They’ll imagine how life…

Christopher Moore’s 2005 novel The Stupidest Angel tells the story of one extremely clueless — albeit extremely powerful — angel who visits the California coastal community of Pine Cove to carry out an extremely spectacular miracle. Which goes, you guessed it, extremely wrong. Not to worry. He eventually carries out a second miracle to fix all the…

Jim Brosnan's books about two years in his life as a baseball player --- The Long Season, published in 1960) and Pennant Race (1962) --- were the first and last of their kind. The books were the first time an active player wrote about what it was like to go through a baseball season --- and…

Talk about Shakespeare’s great King Lear tends to focus on the action of the play and its meaning. A self-satisfied monarch, blind to the consequences of his actions, splits his realm in two, giving half to one daughter and half to the other. To his third and dearest daughter, he gives nothing. Her sin: Failing to…