Book Reviews

There are several running gags that Elmore Leonard has woven through his 2004 novel Mr. Paradise, one of them having to do with the dismemberment of the body of one [...]

I suspect that Joseph Conrad’s short 1917 novel The Shadow-Line, a Confession would have a difficult time finding a publisher today. Let me amend that:  Yes, the head of some [...]

It was one of those encounters that one has in an art museum.  On a day in which I looked at hundreds of paintings and sculptures at the Uffizi Museum [...]

Chester Himes published his hardboiled crime novel The Big Gold Dream more than sixty years ago, and, for a present-day reader, it is something of a time capsule. It depicts [...]

It’s been fifty years since Robert E. Toomey, Jr., published his first novel A World of Trouble in 1973. It was also his last. As I read the sci-fi adventure, [...]

Out of Cabrini is a crackerjack police novel that rises above its genre with a subtly nuanced and very human story of crime and punishment from the perspective of cops, [...]

There is no getting around it.  William Kent Krueger’s 2013 novel Ordinary Grace has been a huge bestseller for a decade. Not only that, but it’s been honored as a [...]

I read a paperback copy of David Hare’s 1995 play Skylight that I found in one of the dozens of free little book boxes scattered across the neighborhoods I frequent [...]

In Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry, Tom Kettle tells the nightmare story of his life in waves of ever-increasing pain, violence and abuse. It is a novel that features [...]

The enchanting image of a dancing woman on the cover of Gloria Fossi’s thickly illustrated 1989 Filippo Lippi is more ambiguous than it appears. Ribbons and linen skirts are tossed [...]