Book Reviews

Book review: “Wild in the World” by John Donovan Published more than half a century ago, John Donovan’s Wild in the World is an exquisitely imagined, delicately rendered novel, terse [...]

Fredric Brown’s murder mystery The Fabulous Clipjoint, first published in 1947 and reissued last December by Penzler Publishers, was good enough to win an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. [...]

Thomas Cromwell, newly named Earl of Essex, is walking at three in the afternoon to the council chamber with one councilor Audley at his side, another Fitzwilliam behind him.  Norfolk [...]

I don’t get it.  I mean, I don’t understand why anyone would divide Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels into those for adults (35) and those for young adults (6). It’s not [...]

As it starts, Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson seems to be a kind of cozy for mystery lovers. It centers on an internet blog list that bookstore owner Malcolm [...]

Ian Buruma’s Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 is a compact history of the island nation, dense with incident and insight, yet also stylishly written. In an animated 177 pages (about 50,000 words), [...]

Jasper P. Duckworth is a critic in an alternate universe Chicago for Chicago Shoulders, a New City-like (or, if you will, Third Coast Review-like) publication — the Associate Media Critic, [...]

It turns out, in Andre Norton’s 1959 Secret of the Lost Race, that the secret about the survivors of the much earlier civilization is pretty eye-popping, biologically speaking.  But, because [...]

The Curious Odyssey of Rudolph Bloom by Chicago writer Richard Reeder is a curious book, and not just because it owes its inspiration to that famous and famously challenging James [...]

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Science Fiction — the generic, er, science fiction novel, written by John Silbersack and published in late 1981 by Jove Books — is [...]