Visions By Patrick T. Reardon I see the hand of God write on the wall the sins of the king. I see the bloody knife. I see the father lead the son to slaughter. I smell the burning bush. I see the furnace, three inside unburnt. I hear the walls...
Near the very end of Julia Keller’s latest Acker’s Gap novel The Cold Way Home (Minotaur, 306 pages, $27.99), Jake Oakes wants something that he knows he may never get, and he tells the woman he loves, Molly Drucker: “I can’t wait and hope. ...
Granny Weatherwax hears a noise outside her witch’s cottage: There was something in the garden. It wasn’t much of a garden. There were the Herbs, and the soft fruit bushes, a bit of lawn, and, of course, the beehives. And it was open...
Two-thirds of the way through Raymond Chandler’s novel Playback, Philip Marlowe is having a conversation with Henry Clarendon IV, an aged, wealthy man who spends his days sitting in a hotel lobby, watching the other guests and anyone else who...
Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folks by W. E. B. Du Bois is an important book of American literature, a significant work in the development of the field of sociology and a foundational text for the study of race relations in the United...
The perfect act outside of Brady’s Tavern By Patrick T. Reardon Stop, short the physical. Yes, you know the noxic feel in the deep and up throat and out, and the thick wet stink up your nose, even though it is his feel, his nose, fellow...
Two dead men. Long ago, the first tried to kill the second with a horrible torture but was killed by an act of a god. The second lived a long, fruitful and productive live and, then, in the normal course of things, died. Now, the second finds the...
On the last page of Elmore Leonard’s 1983 novel La Brava, his title character, Joe La Brava, is told by former screen siren Jean Shaw, “It’s not the movies, Joe.” There are ironies upon ironies in that statement that the reader, by that point, is...
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