The Bell by Iris Murdoch, published in 1958, is something of a time capsule. It is difficult to imagine a novel like this being written today. Murdoch’s subject is holiness and sin. I suspect that no modern novelist would be able to take up...
Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip — two cold-blooded killers who, eventually, will get their comeuppance from the skeletal guy with the scythe — are tourists in Anhk-Morpork. Well, not actually tourists although they do some touristy things and obtain...
Sgt. Sibyl Sue Blue of the spaceport city of Hammond is just, as one of her police colleagues says, “a little bitty girl.” He says this after she knocks a gun from the hand of a skulking Centaurian — a humanoid extraterrestrial — and knees him...
Back around 2800 BC or 2700 BC — in other words, nearly 5,000 years ago — lived a Middle Eastern ruler who later became the inspiration for the hero of the first great work of world literature The Epic of Gilgamesh. This ruler may have been...
There’s something deeply attractive to the idea of bad guys doing good things. That was the idea behind the 1965 bestseller by E. M. Nathanson The Dirty Dozen, about a bunch of criminals who are recruited for a suicidal mission behind enemy lines...
The cover of Menachem Kaiser’s book features several line drawings of large apartment buildings on an orange and white background that gives the appearance of having been Scotch-taped in place. Each apartment building image is covered for...
I’m the sort who, when reading a novel, looks for the title in the text. Sometimes, it’s not there, but, often, I can find it. And, usually, its placement in the the book says something about what’s important in the story. In Rex...
In 1989, Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about a British butler, was published to great acclaim and great sales. The book was soon turned into a highly praised movie with Anthony Hopkins starring as the manservant, Stevens. Six...
Teddy Carella is the hero of Ed McBain’s fourth 87th Precinct novel The Con Man, published in 1957. Teddy — Theodora — was born without the ability to speak and without the ability to hear. But she’s quite a woman — smart and sensitive...
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...
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