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 [...]

I have a bone to pick with people who want to talk about “young adult” books.  To me, this has more to do with the need of a bookstore, say, [...]

“Oh, I read that — in high school, I think,” the waitress said as she saw me with George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm. “Yeah, I might have even read [...]

The nuclear accident on April 26, 1986, at the Chernobyl Power Plant, the worst the world has known, was rooted in human ingenuity, blindness and error and resulted in a [...]