When you think of great Chicago art, maybe it’s Georges-Pierre Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte at the Art Institute of Chicago that comes to mind. Or maybe the [...]
Evan Hunter ends his short 1997 memoir Me and Hitch with praise for the famed director Alfred Hitchcok. Nearly two decades after Hitchcock’s death, Hunter writes: Every time I publish [...]
Mustard seed Patrick T. Reardon Go, get a mustard seed from a home without longing and loss. Delineate, edge, mystic skill and arrogance, quest to escape the [...]
There is much of the Bible in Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece Moby-Dick, and much else besides. As Robert Alter lays out in Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King [...]
In 1170, King Henry II of England refused to give a kiss on the mouth to his former friend Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, then living in exile in [...]
Evan Hunter was a Writer. He sold millions of books over a career that spanned more than half a century, producing more than one hundred novels as well as dozens [...]
I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a review open with a discussion of the dedication at the start of a book. But that’s what I’m going to do here because [...]
Full of compassion Patrick T. Reardon In the assembly, full of compassion, go where sent. The oldest tree, adored and feared. The songs of pines, hymning the moon-sparkled [...]
Ox Patrick T. Reardon Hambone turns like an ox plowing, his shoulder heavier than all the planets, his head full of Cosmos, skin furrow of blue sky, eye [...]
Denmark-born Jens Jensen arrived in Chicago in 1885 in his mid-twenties, still trying to find his way in the world, and soon landed a job as a day laborer in [...]
