A conversation with a writer is, almost always, interesting and insightful. During a long career as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, I was paid to talk with many, including Robert Caro, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Russo, Haki Madhubuti...
In his more than four dozen novels, Terry Pratchett was often silly, witty, wacky and goofy. But he was also, always, serious. Pratchett’s delightfully humorous and endlessly readable books weren’t only aimed at getting a laugh. He employed...
Dorothy Day — that radical of 20th century radicals, that voice of conscience in the face of a self-centered, self-indulgent, greedy American culture, that embracer of the neediest, weakest, most damaged of the poor — is identified...
Behind the mask By Patrick T. Reardon (mask) Behind the museum glass, a polished marble scream, frozen, with large round eye openings, pale stone, gray as smoke, worn in ritual by one with sharp edge, honed for soft flesh...
Go By Patrick T. Reardon In remembrance of Maggie Roche, Ben Scheinkopf, George Kresovich and David Reardon Right onto Cermak from Harlem to go west, listening to the dead singer’s song from when she was young, from when I...
The lost tribes, part 3 By Patrick T. Reardon The lost tribes found me alone as she and he stared into each other’s eyes. They found me with drool chafing my chin, a clump of flesh that nervoused her, carried by him like a bag of...
Word By Patrick T. Reardon Declaw the lion King to a plaster saint. Declaw Lincoln to a penny. Declaw Francis to a birdbath. Declaw the man with nails in his wrists. Pull claws from humbly proffered hands. Pull teeth. Pull the skin...
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...
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...
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