William M. Stableford’s 1971 transposition of Homer’s Iliad into The Days of Glory is a clever piece of science fiction, especially for a guy who was then in his early [...]

For the past two millenniums, Christianity has so influenced Western society that there is an expectation that a spiritual leader, like Jesus, should be without sin.  In the Catholic Church, [...]

Why do I read a book?  I mean, this particular book or that one.  I mean, what triggers the decision to open a book and start reading. Obviously, there are [...]

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the Nac Mac Feegles are six-inch-tall, red-haired, blue-skinned fairies who — nearly all of them male — drink, fight, steal and swear in something like a [...]

The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey by Edith Hall, published in 2008, is an expansive and detailed study of the countless ways the ancient Greek epic [...]

The culmination of Vonda N. McIntyre’s 1978 novel Dreamsnake comes in the final pages when the healer woman Snake confronts North, the dark presence of the story. It is a [...]

Toya Wolfe’s debut novel Last Summer on State Street is a harrowing, poignant and visceral evocation of life and death in the Robert Taylor public housing development in its final [...]

There is an awful lot going on in P.D. James’s 1989 novel Devices and Desires — maybe too much.  Either way, it’s quite a book. This was her eighth novel [...]