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...
Elmore Leonard was in his early 30s and still learning his craft when, in 1956, he published The Escape from Five Shadows. Missing is the snappy dialogue that he became known for. Missing, too, are the sharply drawn characters, both...
The 29-year-old Elmore Leonard had been a professional writer for just three years when, in 1954, he published his second novel The Law at Randado. It’s a book that displays some of the awkwardness one would expect from a new writer. But what...
I just finished one of those challenges on Facebook, this one wanting me on consecutive days to post an image of an album that influenced my musical taste, without comment. Here, in alphabetical order, is the full list, with a tiny comment...
Xavier X. Salomon ends his short, beautifully produced, extravagantly illustrated 2016 book The Art of Guido Cagnacci by quoting two words from a letter that two Italian luminaries exchanged nearly a century after the artist’s death. Cagnacci...
On the surface, Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is about two highly controversial verses that may or may not have been in Qur’an. Certainly, that’s what got Rushdie in trouble at the time with Ayatollah Ruhollah...
The scribbled telegram text, sent by messenger from the top of Mount Everest, was bleak — but also a bit odd. Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement All well News of failure was not unexpected from...
Lamentation By Patrick T. Reardon Let Israel now say, let Aaron now say, give thanks, mercy endures, mystery forever his majesty. Bulleted chaste gazelle, backyard cement, clot-blood hosed onto yellow winter grass...
When you’re looking for a good novel about Chicago, you’re most likely to turn to those writers identified as Chicago writers, such as Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March) and Sara Paretsky (Indemnity Only) and Richard Wright (Native Son)...
There are many very good and even great books about Chicago, and, based on my half century of writing about Chicago, here are the ten that, at the moment, I think are the best — and, after this list, there’s one that’s a real clunker: The...
Blessed, a poem for a pandemic By Patrick T. Reardon Blessed are the dead and the dying. Blessed, the mourn-filled good-byes to loves behind glass, behind walls. Blessed, neighborhoods of pain, grief communities...
Kristina Gehrmann’s graphic novel version of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle is suitably gritty and oppressive, but probably not ugly enough. I’m not sure it would be possible for this kind of illustrative work to capture the...
Here is the sad reality at the center of Leo Steinberg’s 2001 book Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper: Of Leonardo’s Last Supper we have only an after-image….[O]f the original surface — of its color and atmosphere, its breath of sfumato, its...
My friend Mark and his wife Cathy were coming home on a mid-March Saturday from the sad burden of the funeral of their 42-year-old daughter Margaret. Margaret, a wife and the mother of three children, 5 and younger, had died of breast cancer a...
Cathy gave me a haircut today on the back porch. In our 37 years of marriage, that hasn’t happened before, but we’re not leaving the house for haircuts or much anything else, and I was getting pretty shaggy, and, well, we made do. (I hope...
The afternoon was cold, dark and rainy at Calvary Cemetery. Maybe that’s why I ended up in my short walk there, focusing on the textures of things, such as this sideview of one of several angels adorning a tombstone. I liked...
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