One of my favorite poems in Haki R. Madhubuti’s new, career-spanning collection Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language is “Big Momma,” originally published in 1970. Back a half century [...]
Midway through Terry Pratchett’s 1997 novel Jingo, a conversation takes place between Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson and Corporal Delphine Angua von Überwald. He is a 6’6” dwarf (by adoption) who’s the [...]
The shoot-out that ends Elmore Leonard’s 1977 novel The Hunted is just like those in the westerns he was still writing back in those days. Three heavily armed bad guys, [...]
After nearly 60 years, Gislebertus: Sculptor of Autun by Denis Grivot and George Zarnecki remains the best book on the astonishingly vivid, highly original art of the medieval French master. [...]
As the title of his 2011 book indicates, Laurence Bergreen has a tight focus to his storytelling in Columbus: The Four Voyages. He provides very little about the first 41 [...]
It’s the mid-1970s, central London, and four people in their 60s, two men and two men, have been working together for two or three years in a small office doing [...]
In the dark night and under the icy water, Cordelia Gray, lungs bursting, is swimming for her life. She knows that the sea is death if she cannot find the [...]
Haven Kimmel’s 2001 memoir A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana is a rollickingly funny entertainment about the childhood of a strange child in a strange family [...]
If Emily Dickinson had had a sense of humor, she might have written "A Girl Named Zippy." And if she'd been born in 1965 in Indiana. That's when and where [...]
It is a telling irony that Lucy Parsons — one of the most famous African-American women in Chicago’s history — pretended she wasn’t black. Not only that. According to historian [...]
