Book Reviews

When last we saw Sammy Tiffin, he was the central character of Christopher Moore’s 2018 comic mystery-thriller-fantasy Noir which, as the name indicates, was a stab by Moore at writing [...]

At the start, Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, is running away.  Later, he is running to — to the hospital.  At the end, he is running willy-nilly, without direction, into the [...]

Anna Dowdall’s third novel April on Paris Street is a literate and attractively convoluted murder mystery, with this odd wrinkle: The murder doesn’t happen until near the very end of [...]

In his story collection Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, Chicagoan Tim Jones-Yelvington zestfully recasts gay men and boys in the central roles of a surprisingly wide array [...]

Richard Carrington has been called a naturalist and a naturalist-historian.  But, above all, he’s a writer. In his 1957 Mermaids and Mastodons, he writes about creatures and events from millions [...]

Well, I was at the Newberry Library Book Fair at the end of July, and my eye was caught by the cover of Walt Huffine’s 1970 Alabam McCall.  It showed [...]

Emily Wilson, a classical studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, set herself a challenging task — to translate Homer’s Odyssey into modern English in lines of iambic pentameter. To [...]

I have a theory about Elmore Leonard’s 1988 novel Freaky Deaky. I suspect that one of the main characters, Donnell Lewis — an ex-Black Panther and ex-con who is sort [...]

In early July, I tested positive for Covid, and, within hours, I’d started a regimen of five days of Paxlovid.  I had a range of mild symptoms, not bad, and [...]

Near the end of his concise life of the Bible’s David, David Wolpe writes:   He is such a contradictory personality that even the ancient rabbis confessed: “We are unable [...]