It’s ironic that Spoon River Anthology — perhaps the most famous book about an American small town and one that has helped shape the way Americans think about small towns and similar communities — was written by a Chicagoan, Edgar Lee Masters...
British cultural historian Rosemary Hill begins her 2008 book Stonehenge about the famed prehistoric place with these words: What we now call Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire at Latitude 51” 11’ North, Grid Reference SU 122 421...
Patrolman Bert Kling is 24 and newly back from serving in Korea where he’d seen terrorized women, and starving women, and begging women. But, writes Ed McBain in The Mugger, “he never once connected those women with the pleasure he felt in...
Paddy Clarke is a nine-year-old, lower middle-class, small-town Irish boy who turns ten somewhere during the course of Roddy Doyle’s hilarious, revelatory and achingly tender 1993 novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. The oldest of four children, he is...
I’m not sure what to say. Larry McMurtry was a highly praised, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and Leaving Cheyenne, his second book, has been described by some fans as his best. But I found it flat. The fault may lie in me. ...
The red-haired cop looks at Ricky Rudolph and, with an angry edge to his voice, asks, “You think Jesus Christ is a joke?” Well, no, Ricky doesn’t, but the cop might be forgiven for jumping to that conclusion. Ricky dresses in...
Muslims, it seems to me, are onto something when they assert that their sacred text, the Qur’an, the Word of God given to Muhammad in Arabic and later written down in that language, is untranslatable. It is for this reason, notes religion...
One of the pleasures of reading Aaron Cohen’s 2019 Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power is its walk down memory lane of the great Chicago-based soul music created over the course of a quarter century, beginning in the late...
Robot factory By Patrick T. Reardon . Windows broken, robot factory silent, acres of weed-written empty — I flame by on Cain & Abel Highway for Albuquerque, wanting to get where I’m going — a messiah boy from the hills...
Some of the 75 essays of flash nonfiction in Fast Funny Women have punchlines, such as “Binging on Ozark” by cartoonist/writer Nicole Hollander. It’s a piece that has to do with her often dysfunctional (on her part) relationship with her close...
When the operation began, the man “went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled.” But the reader knows he will not emerge alive. He was dead and in his grave on the first page of Philip Roth’s...
Nearly four decades ago, historian Gary Wills explained how Abraham Lincoln used his Gettysburg Address to redefine — rededicate — the United States by enshrining the Declaration of Independence as the core statement of the nation, instead of the...
Philip Jose Farmer’s 1975 novel Venus on the Half-Shell was based on a gimmick, so it’s not surprising that it’s filled with gimmicks, most of which, to my mind, seem rooted in a high school sophomore’s sense of humor. There are those, I’m sure...
The Hebrew Bible is big on prophets and big on sin. There are four major prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. And a dozen minor prophets who wrote shorter books of only a few chapters or, in the case of Obadiah, just 600...
This essay originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune on 3.15.21. Well, Pope Francis, I disagree. I respect much of what you’ve done in the papacy, Holy Father, but this statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued Monday...
I’m a stranger here myself. The Little Black Dress by Andre Leon Talley with photographs by Adam Kuehl is the elegant and lavish catalogue of an exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), September 28, 2012 – January 31...
Midway through Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel, The Homesman, Mary Bee Cuddy wakes up and, from her bedroll by the frame wagon, hears the good-for-nothing cull Briggs, the claim-jumper she saved from hanging, shouting, “Whooeee!” There, by the...
A little more than a century ago, in one of the world’s largest cities, Chicagoans lived a lot closer to nature than we do today — as in closer to animals and their smells and their manure and urine. Consider that, in 1918, some 2,000 dairy cows...
I can’t think of another Elmore Leonard book that has a subtitle like his 1980 City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. That’s also a pretty portentous, if not to say pretentious, title. Usually, Elmore’s titles are snappier, such as Get Shorty...
Sixteen-year-old Nomi opens her story by telling the reader that she lives with her father, Ray Nickel, in “that low brick bungalow” out on Highway 12. Her audience is someone who will know the place, someone who lives in or near East...
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