In the annals of English-language literature, Alexander Portnoy is one of the great characters — larger than life in his sexual obsessions, his anti-Jewish Jewishness, his psychological complexes, his arrogant [...]
A thriller written more than half a century ago, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three by John Godey still thrills today. And it’s also something of a time capsule, [...]
“Think of them as fellow human beings,” Robert D. Richardson instructs the reader in the preface of his 2023 book Three Roads Back. And that is apt advice although, at [...]
Historian Andrea Wulf packs a lot into 337 pages in her 2015 book The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, and much of it will be surprising and [...]
Chicago-born Mary Fleming’s Civilisation Francaise is a novel of layers, like an onion, layers slowly peeled away for the reader to learn the stories of the book’s two central characters, [...]
Noir fiction, like film noir, deals with bad guys doing bad things, often to each other. So why do we care? James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity — serialized in 1936 [...]
John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner is one of the saddest novels ever published. It’s sad not because it is maudlin, but because it isn’t. Williams writes of William Stoner with [...]
D.R. Sherman’s Old Mali and the Boy, published in 1964, is a complex and poignant fable about love, set in northern India in the first half of the twentieth century. [...]
American thrillers tend to be strictly for entertainment. Oh, yes, there may be a subtext message to the reader that, if you don’t do something about something — such as [...]
Herman Wouk’s short science-fiction allegory The “Lomokome” Papers was written in 1949, just four years after the United States dropped two atom bombs on Japan, ushering in the nuclear era. [...]
