Saw you at the hop By Patrick T. Reardon I was nine when I saw you through open eighth grade door — before you went to Army, to Europe, to Normandy Beach a week after D-Day, and hernia, and British nurse Betsie, and Germany, the camp...
In November, 1904, Fannie Barrier Williams, activist, iconoclast, orator and writer, led an attack on racism with a tea cup. She and other members of Chicago’s interracial Frederick Douglass Center held a reception at which the women, black and...
Goddess Dementia By Patrick T. Reardon Goddess Dementia, come, waltz with me down gray floors, along sour green walls, through Muzak air. Undress me in my doorless room. One button at a time, unfasten my pajama top, unbutton...
All art is strange, disquieting. Read Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or attend a performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear. These are idiosyncratic creations to the extreme. Nothing else quite like them, even works by the same...
The Painted Word is an essay by Tom Wolfe, originally published in Harper’s Magazine in April, 1975 and then released in June of that year as a slim book, 99 pages in the edition I just read. In it, Wolfe, then a wunderkind of what was beginning...
Terry Pratchett’s 41 Discworld novels have sold in the millions, so it stands to reason that there must be a lot of people who are fans of Rincewind. He is, of course, the main character in seven of the books, including three of the first...
Bridge By Patrick T. Reardon My first job landed on me like a ton of children on my four-hundred-and-twenty-eighth day. It began with my brother. Two sisters followed. Two more brothers. Eight more sisters. The first leads...
Carrie’s husband Bill doesn’t make an appearance in Sharyn Skeeter’s Dancing with Langston until near the end of the novel. And, when he does show up at the Harlem apartment of soon-to-be-evicted Cousin Ella, the reader’s ready to dislike...
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