Naill Renfro has the Green Sick and has been exiled into the great, dark forest. He awakens from a fever dream and drags himself to a nearby pool for a drink. Instead, he makes a shocking discovery when he looks in the water. ...
Adam Levin’s 2010 novel The Instructions is nothing if not ambitious. Weighing in at 1,030 pages, it deals deeply with the interior lives of pre-teens, the hair-splitting debates of Torah and Talmudic scholarship, the question of turning the...
There is a temptation to start off this review with a pun, but no dice. I know that I’m nowhere near as good at it as Terry Pratchett, as he shows in Soul Music, published in 1995. For instance, the talking raven — of course, there’s a...
When Bill Sikes is introduced in Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens describes him thusly: “The man who growled out these words, was a stoutly-built fellow of about five-and-thirty, in a black velveteen coat, very soiled drab breeches, lace-up half...
Elmore Leonard’s first novel The Bounty Hunters was published in 1953, just eight years after World War II, and it was part of a movement in American arts to reevaluate the national myths. On the surface level, the war seemed to endorse the...
The Song of Songs is one of three very odd books in the Bible. Ecclesiastes expresses a deep mournful existential angst not found anywhere else in the Jewish and Christian scriptures; life is short and hard. Meanwhile, Job wrestles...
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m feeling sort of left out. This past weekend, President Donald Trump tweeted about how much he dislikes singer and activist John Legend and his wife Chrissy Teigen, throwing schoolyard insults at them. But...
Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, published in Italian in 1975, is a literary memoir of high art and broad ambition. It covers the waterfront. The periodic table, of course, is a major subject — that list of chemical elements, now totaling...
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