The key moment in John William Nelson’s important, original and eye-opening history of the place that became the city of Chicago — Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the [...]
In his novel Man’s Fate, Andre Malraux tells the story of the Communist insurrectionists who took control of Shanghai in March, 1927, and then were massacred a month later by [...]
Towards Zero, published by Agatha Christie in 1944, is a reminder of how creative she was as a mystery writer. Christie was the epitome of what’s called the Golden Age [...]
When Jane Austen wrote The Beautifull Cassandra at the age of 12 in 1788, she added the subtitle: A Novel in Twelve Chapters. That’s a big claim for a work [...]
Barbara Pym wrote Some Tame Gazelle in the mid-1930s, shortly after she graduated from Oxford University, and it was rejected by several publishers. After World War II, she revised it, [...]
Here’s how Celia Dale’s 1943 novel The Least of These ends. I’m going to tell you this because, at the moment, the odds are very much stacked against your ever [...]
Somehow, somewhere, I obtained a fairly solid copy of P.G. Konody’s small book Filippo Lippi, published in London in 1911 as part of a series titled Masterpieces in Colour. [...]
In the annals of English-language literature, Alexander Portnoy is one of the great characters — larger than life in his sexual obsessions, his anti-Jewish Jewishness, his psychological complexes, his arrogant [...]
A thriller written more than half a century ago, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three by John Godey still thrills today. And it’s also something of a time capsule, [...]
“Think of them as fellow human beings,” Robert D. Richardson instructs the reader in the preface of his 2023 book Three Roads Back. And that is apt advice although, at [...]
