The first love in Elena Garro’s novella First Love isn’t exactly what you might expect. For one thing, it isn’t about teenagers nor about the sweaty, fevered lust that love [...]
On Christmas Day, 1937, the family of Doremus Jessup is enjoying a festive afternoon in their Vermont home with friends, including shop-owner Louis Rotenstern, a Jewish bachelor. Suddenly, there’s a [...]
Over the last half century, scores and probably hundreds of books have been published about the 1963 assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and its investigation by the Warren Commission. [...]
I’ve written before about the difficulty of translating Terry Pratchett’s funny, witty, silly, insightful, wacky and clear-eyed novels into other art media. A year and a half ago, I saw [...]
Many reviewers were flummoxed last year when they tried to come to grips with Kazuo Ishiguro’s seventh novel The Buried Giant. A lot of readers are likely to have the [...]
In the jagged, inscrutable ways of families, Eunice Lipton’s A Distant Heartbeat is a love story. It is a love story that encompasses affection, loss, flight, innocence, competition, anger, sex, [...]
She wasn’t his wife, but Henry Marten loved Mary Ward, the mother of their three young daughters whom he called endearingly his “pretty brats,” his “biddies” and, after a bout [...]
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin is a monumental, heavily detailed, ground-breaking and deeply humane look at the political murder of 14 million people by the Soviet Union [...]
Mayor Richard J. Daley Back in the mid-1970s, when I was a newly minted reporter, I covered Chicago’s City Hall for a while. I remember that, at news [...]
Manhole covers are beautiful. There, I’ve said it. Just give them a look. I mean, really look at them. You’ll agree. Take these six from Manhole Covers, the 1994 book [...]
