In the 1850s, Swedish writer Fredricka Bremer visited to Chicago and, to say the least, was not impressed. Ben Wilson notes in his sweeping and astute Metropolis: A History of [...]
Philip K. Dick performs a clever feat of literary dipsy-doodle at the end of his 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, and he throws into question the reality [...]
In his introduction to Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, T. J. Clark makes it clear that the subtext of the book has to do with the [...]
Drew Gilpin Faust’s 2008 book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is an extraordinary achievement that answers a needed but previously unasked question: How did Americans [...]
The metaphor Thich Nhat Hanh uses to describe Buddha’s teaching is that of a raft. It is, he writes, only a raft to help you cross the river, a finger [...]
Over the years, I’ve written about Scrooge and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol several times. In 2014, I published an op-ed piece for the Chicago Tribune, titled “Was he Scrooge [...]
Toward the end of Elmore Leonard’s 1985 crime novel Glitz, Miami Police Lt. Vincent Mora, rehabbing after being shot in a mugging while carrying groceries, is in a comp-ed suite [...]
The Teddy in Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s new short story collection Sacred City has a way of telling a tale that starts here and ends up there after a [...]
It’s clear that John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella Of Mice and Men was written to be read as a parable. But a parable for what? I mean, what’s the lesson it [...]
Stephanie Gangi’s Carry the Dog is an overwrought potboiler of the old school, packed to the brim with modern-day hot-button issues. It’s a lot like the 1966 Jacqueline Susann novel [...]
