Book Reviews

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. [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In the epilogue of her astute, significant and multi-dimensional Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer focuses on the work of sculptor Teodoro Ramos Blanco. She writes that, during the course [...]

At some point, near the end of Hubert Monteilhet’s The Praying Mantises, one character says to another: “You’re the worst of the three of us.” That’s saying a lot.  By [...]

I’m not sure how old I was when I first read Andre Norton’s 1952 novel Daybreak 2250 AD.  In an essay about the book that I wrote for the Chicago [...]

African American lovers Beatrice Verdene Chapel and Jim Waters are the central characters in Jasmine Elizabeth Smith’s anguished, violent, blues-infused poetry collection South Flight, published by the University of Georgia [...]