In November, 1904, Fannie Barrier Williams, activist, iconoclast, orator and writer, led an attack on racism with a tea cup. She and other members of Chicago’s interracial Frederick Douglass Center [...]
All art is strange, disquieting. Read Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or attend a performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear. These are idiosyncratic creations to the extreme. Nothing else quite [...]
The Painted Word is an essay by Tom Wolfe, originally published in Harper’s Magazine in April, 1975 and then released in June of that year as a slim book, 99 [...]
Terry Pratchett’s 41 Discworld novels have sold in the millions, so it stands to reason that there must be a lot of people who are fans of Rincewind. He [...]
Carrie’s husband Bill doesn’t make an appearance in Sharyn Skeeter’s Dancing with Langston until near the end of the novel. And, when he does show up at the Harlem [...]
Elmore Leonard was in his early 30s and still learning his craft when, in 1956, he published The Escape from Five Shadows. Missing is the snappy dialogue that [...]
The 29-year-old Elmore Leonard had been a professional writer for just three years when, in 1954, he published his second novel The Law at Randado. It’s a book that displays [...]
Xavier X. Salomon ends his short, beautifully produced, extravagantly illustrated 2016 book The Art of Guido Cagnacci by quoting two words from a letter that two Italian luminaries exchanged nearly [...]
On the surface, Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is about two highly controversial verses that may or may not have been in Qur'an. Certainly, that’s what got Rushdie [...]
The scribbled telegram text, sent by messenger from the top of Mount Everest, was bleak — but also a bit odd. Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop [...]
