The Glorious Pool, with the salaciously seductive image of a nude woman on the cover, is a screwball comedy of a novel about a fountain — er, pool — of youth. Published at the start of 1934, just a few months before the death of its 42-year-old author Thorne Smith, the novel would have made…

r Kathleen Osberger’s account of her three harrowing months as a religious volunteer with a community of Catholic nuns in Chile a half century ago brings the reader deep into the experience of living, working and trying to stay alive in a dictatorship built on violence and on “disappearing” anyone viewed as an opponent. Although…

The concluding sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s eloquent, poignant and contemplative Second Inaugural Address has long been held up as one of the most stirring evocations of American idealism.  It reads: With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on…

With its strangeness and ambiguities, with its dreaminess and veiled threats, Carson McCullers’s 1948 novel The Member of the Wedding has the feel of a book-length prose poem. Certainly, a part of this is its rootedness in the Southern Gothic tradition.  There are odd characters in a small Alabama town here although, truth be told,…

Ask the average American, and you’d most likely find that the British royals have a pretty dopey reputation. For nearly half a century, there have been all these tabloid stories about the scandalous behavior of a largish clan of people who don’t seem to do much of value.  They show up; that’s their job. The…

In late 1972, Ed Marciniak, a perennial social critic and justice activist, became president of the Institute of Urban Life, a small program affiliated with Loyola University Chicago.  He had just finished a twelve-year run as an “insider,” working in the Richard J. Daley administration where he’d had to temper his voice and his actions.…

Kate Wilhelm envisions a community of clones as a really dysfunctional family.  Wait, that’s not quite right.  In her 1976 science-fiction novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, she envisions a community of clones as the most functional family you could think of — that is, if “functional” means ruthlessly efficient and totally focused on…

A book means something different to an author than it does to a reader. Actually, each reader has a personal experience of the book, different in small and large ways from the experience of every other reader.  But all of them are coming to the book as a completed thing.  The author, by contrast, started…