There is an elegiac quality to Kathleen Naureckas’s 2012 poetry chapbook For the Duration. The title is a reference to the phrase she remembered in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, during World [...]
Relatively early in Christopher Moore’s heartwarming tale of Christmas terror titled The Stupidest Angel, he notes: According to the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, you had [...]
There are a goodly number of alternative-history novels that imagine what life would have been like if Hitler had won World War II, and I’ve read my share. Three of [...]
The tone of C.S. Forester’s 1926 novel Payment Deferred is distinctively light and breezy. Think of the way a great storyteller sitting at a campfire might spin a tale about [...]
I first read Robert A. Caro’s Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson in the spring of 1990, right after it was published. I mean to say, I gobbled [...]
This is kind of embarrassing. I was about two-thirds of the way through Irish Murdoch’s 1961 novel A Severed Head when I saw in passing a reference to it as [...]
Chicago doesn’t play much of a role in Rob Wilkins’s biography of his boss, Terry Pratchett, the British mega-selling author of the fantasy-science fiction Discworld series whose life was cut [...]
When you think of it, sending a letter in the mail is a small act of hope. It’s the same sending a text or an email. You compose your message [...]
The softcover edition of John W. Thomason Jr.’s Gone to Texas is visually striking but, in the manner of many paperbacks, misleading. Nevertheless, it turned out to be misleading in [...]
Sometime last September, I happened upon a musical called The Wild Party — book, music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa — being performed by the Blank Theatre Company on a [...]
