Poem: Arrival of Godot
Arrival of Godot By Patrick T. Reardon Comfort, yes, comfort, New Jerusalem. Your penance is at its end. Your guilt expiated. Gather, you, Mayor and City Council, in noon-sun Daley Plaza. [...]
Book review: “Write Cut Rewrite: The Cutting Room Floor of Modern Literature” by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon
Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and had avoided assassination? What if I had [...]
Book Review: “Democracy’s Rebirth: The View from Chicago” by Dick Simpson
A half a century ago, as a new political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Dick Simpson won election to the Chicago City Council for the [...]
Book review: “Elsewhere: An Elegy” by Faisal Mohyuddin
In his poem “The Hourglass. The Pebble. The Throne of God,” Faisal Mohyuddin ponders “the lightless language of elegy.” His father is dead, and he is grieving. And he wonders [...]
Book review: “The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City” by Kevin Baker
The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City is Kevin Baker’s love letter to the city and the sport and the way they have intertwined for [...]
“The Eiger Sanction” by Trevanian
Some thoughts on re-reading Trevanian’s The Eiger Sanction nearly half a century after I first read it: The thriller The Eiger Sanction was published in 1972 and quickly became [...]
Book review: “Original Sin” by P.D. James
There are two original sins in P.D. James’s 1994 Original Sin. One is central to the mystery. The other is a mournful shadow of history. The story also features the [...]
Book review: “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” by Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie’s 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories is joyous, inventive, delightful, funny, fun, enticing, stimulating, dazzling and playful. It opens with a sentence about “a sad city, [...]
Book review: “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” by Salman Rushdie
Less than two years ago, novelist Salman Rushdie was the victim of a stabbing attack that left him near death. His newly published nonfiction book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted [...]
Essay: The endless ripples of a book recommendation
About five years ago, I read two books that knocked my socks off — the exquisitely evocative Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and that massive, epic, beautiful whale of [...]