Elmore Leonard’s novel Split Images opens in this grim way: In the winter of 1981 a multimillionaire by the name of Robinson Daniels shot a Haitian refugee who had broken into his home in Palm Beach. The Haitian had walked to the ocean from...
At the center of Thomas R. Nevin’s revelatory, deeply felt and actively contemplative 2013 study The Last Years of Saint Therese: Doubt and Darkness, 1895-1897 are nearly two dozen sentences from early in her final autobiographical manuscript...
Early in the first in-depth examination of bravura in art, Nicola Suthor, a professor of art history at Yale, tells the story of Raphael and Michelangelo meeting on the street. Raphael was with a bunch of other men; Michelangelo was alone. ...
Fred Waitzkin’s 2019 novella Deep Water Blues has the feel of someone leisurely telling a simple modern-day sea saga about betrayal, violence and sharks amid a tropical paradise of cobalt skies and beautiful vistas. It’s as if a big-city...
Robert Stassi, a Methodist minister with two master’s degrees and a Ph. D., is explaining the exterminator business to the new recruit. Stassi is called The Most Dangerous Man because he has nothing left to lose in life. His wife died...
In 1971, Linda Nochlin wrote her groundbreaking ARTnews essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” as a manifesto of the new feminist art history, challenging millenniums of art-field tyranny by males. Thirty-five years later, writing in...
It strikes me as odd that the last of Ralph Hale Mottram’s many books was The Twentieth Century: A Personal Record, published in 1969, two years before he died at the age of 87. Today, Mottram is largely forgotten except for his highly praised...
I’m Catholic to the core. I lector at Mass. My kids went to twelve years of Catholic school. I know the smell of incense and the flickering of altar candles. I was an altar boy and, for a long while, thought I might become a...
Liberty By Patrick T. Reardon . On Bedloe’s Island, ducking the tour, I stowed away and, at night, when all bodies had emptied out of the body, found the command deck where, with a touch of...
Elmore Leonard’s 1980 novel Gold Coast has one of the best brush-off, get-out-of-my-life, this-relationship-is-over lines I’ve ever seen: “I enjoyed meeting you. Now beat it. Okay?” I mention that as an aside since the main point I...
The 18-year-old blond boy runs, and Detective/2nd Grade Steve Carella gives chase through the large city park. He couldn’t understand why the kid was risking more trouble than a small narcotics buy was worth, but he didn’t stop to...
One parent who makes a short appearance in Louise Fitzhugh’s 1974 young adult novel Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change is a poverty-stricken ex-prize fighter named Mad Dog Madden. He’s a single father who’s not cut out to be a single father...
Ken Follett’s 1978 novel Eye of the Needle works so well — nearly half a century later, it remains a gripping read — that it may well be the perfect thriller. And a key reason for that is Follett’s decision to tell his story from three...
Shroud for a Nightingale, published in 1971, was the fourth crime novel by P.D. James, the fourth of a series centered on Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh that would eventually total 14. It was much better than the three previous books —...
This is where I came in. In 2000, The Fifth Elephant was Terry Pratchett’s 24th Discworld novel, and his American publisher was pushing the book and the Discworld series as another Harry Potter. Pratchett’s series about a flat world riding on the...
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. ...
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