Surrender, premeditate nothing, want nothing, neither discern nor dissect nor stare, but rather shift, dodge, lose focus, and — slowing down — consider the only material that presents itself, in [...]
There is a beautiful embrace of complexity, a wonderful delight in ambiguity and amazements, to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s 2007 book of history, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. It is the [...]
Christopher Moore is a writer of joyfully goofy and ribald novels about such things as vampires, demons, San Francisco, a Native-American trickster and the comic aspects of Shakespeare’s tragedies, such [...]
Published in 1970, The City Dwellers by Charles Platt is based on the belief that cities were going to hell in a handbasket. One of Platt’s earliest published fiction books, [...]
Published on January 1, 1939, Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male crackles with tension and action, heightened by an unusual point of view — the perspective of a hunted man. Normally, a [...]
Maybe I’m not as good of a Yankee fan as I’d thought. Or maybe it’s something about baseball cards. Truth is, Bob Woods’ Yankee Greats: 100 Classic Baseball Cards, lushly [...]
Ours is an era in which novels, both high-brow and middle-brow, tend to stress the hardships and trauma of modern living. Recent bestsellers, for instance, tell stories about an abandoned [...]
It was their first night on the small Soldier Island, and the group of eight guests had just dined on an excellent supper, served by Rogers the butler and prepared [...]
Seven Smith’s girlfriend Joy asks him about Jim Flood. “You speak of him with affection, yet he’s done such terrible things.” What kind of guy is he? Seven, a 21-year-old [...]
For one reason or another, I’ve owned a copy of the Richard Hughes novel A High Wind in Jamaica, for about 40 years, but it wasn’t until the past week [...]
