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 [...]
As the cover for Terry Bisson’s Galaxy Quest makes clear, the novel really isn’t completely Bisson’s. It’s the novelization of a screenplay for the comic movie Galaxy Quest by Robert [...]
Nine-year-old Damian Cunningham and his brother Anthony, a year older, are at a bank in their English town, trying to open an account in which to put a bag-load of [...]
Two-thirds of the way through Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2021 Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, I had to take a break. I was sick and tired [...]
Summer mornings, in my West Side childhood, I would go out on our rickety second-story back porch, and, across the alley, on the worn, gray asphalt of the parking lot/school [...]
