Andre Norton’s short 1962 novel Eye of the Monster is a disturbing story in which the native race of a world called Ishkur, pejoratively nicknamed Crocs, are brutal, foul-smelling and bestial. For twenty years, the Crocs have been held at bay by the Empire’s Patrol — a space army of sorts — while humans have…

Much is not known about William Shakespeare, as Thomas Marc Parrott acknowledges in his agile, erudite and very helpful 1934 book William Shakespeare: A Handbook.  But the man’s plays and poems do provide a great many clues. For instance, the details that work their way into Shakespeare’s writings indicate that he was not a bookish…

William Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have been the touchstone of English and world literature for more than four centuries ago.  But the man behind them, known in his time as an important actor as well as a writer, has been a cipher for later generations. This has bedeviled many scholars over the hundreds of years,…

As a title, An Angel in Sodom is evocative and a bit ambiguous. The subtitle of Jim Elledge’s book is much more direct:  Henry Gerber and the Birth of the Gay Rights Movement. This is a biography of Gerber, a cantankerous visionary who attempted a century ago to go to bat for gay people like…

Near the end of Stewart Sterling’s 1946 novel Where There’s Smoke, Ben Pedley rips the dress off a sultry songstress named Leila Lownes and then throws his body on her. But it’s not what you think.  Pedley is the Fire Marshall of New York City and has been investigating a series of arsons that somehow…

Terry Pratchett is writing about a particular kind of madness that can affect human beings, those of heightened sensitivities, such as artists. He’s embodied this mental aberration in a bodiless, brainless creature, called a hiver, that causes a great deal of trouble in the 2004 novel A Hat Full of Sky, the 32nd installment in…

Two images from The Missing of the Somme, the 1994 book by Geoff Dyer about memory and the Great War, now called World War I: Young men, lined up at the start of the war to enlist. John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed, a long horizontal work with three levels — the bottom, a chaos frieze…

In The Penelopiad, her 2005 revisualization of The Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope, Margaret Atwood uses the queen of Ithaca’s twelve maids as a Greek chorus to comment on the action — including their own brutal execution by hanging. Penelope has been known through the centuries as the epitome of the faithful…

In his 2004 Discworld novel A Hat Full of Sky, Terry Pratchett suggests that people “weren’t stupid just because they lived a long time ago.” He’s describing a fictional version of the Uffington White Horse which was carved out of the downlands in Oxfordshire, about 60 miles northwest of what’s now London.  As he explains…

In her new book of poetry Woman without Shame, Sandra Cisneros looks aging in the face and laughs.  She laughs at the frenetic lusts and couplings of youth — at broken hearts and confusions. She thumbs her nose at her prudish Catholic upbringing and, lovingly, at her prudish Catholic mother.  She embraces herself and giggles. …