The advertisement in the Vienna newspaper on February 2, 1771, was the sort of plea that has been repeated in one medium or another since earliest human times. Three [...]
David Slavitt’s novel The Hussar is the story of Lieutenant Stefan F———, a young Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer in 1866, new to his regiment and to military life, who, in [...]
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple is a richly researched, engagingly told and brutally direct indictment of the [...]
If you want to know Chicago, you gotta know the grid. If I tell you I live at 6220 North Paulina Street, you know that my two-flat is 62 [...]
In his more than four dozen novels, Terry Pratchett was often silly, witty, wacky and goofy. But he was also, always, serious. Pratchett’s delightfully humorous and endlessly readable books weren’t [...]
Dorothy Day — that radical of 20th century radicals, that voice of conscience in the face of a self-centered, self-indulgent, greedy American culture, that embracer of the neediest, [...]
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 [...]
