T.S. Hawkins was enamored of the ability of some men to make a bull whip crack like a pistol and keep a team of oxen in order. Accordingly, he watched [...]
What’s striking about the 1989 erotic novel The Ages of Lulu by Spanish writer Almudena Grandes is how old-fashioned it is. Yes, yes, there are all those sex scenes in [...]
Published in 1965, John le Carre’s spy novel The Looking Glass War arrived at and helped bring about the beginning of the end of romantic notions about our spies being [...]
I wish I could say that Daybreak – 2250 A.D. by Andre Norton has great literary merit. But it doesn't. It was one of the first novels in the aftermath [...]
One night in Asculum in 91 BC, the crowd at the theater was made up of Romans and people from the town and other parts of Italy that were allied [...]
On one of the first pages of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dolly Oblonsky is packing to leave her womanizing husband and is described as taking something out of an open [...]
In The South Side, WBEZ reporter Natalie Y. Moore examines the myriad ways in which the lives of African-Americans in the Chicago region are limited, constrained, stifled and lessened by [...]
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. [...]
