If ever there were a trigger warning needed, it’s the one for David Scott Hay’s new novel [NSFW] which cautions the reader that the novel includes “sex, drug use, witchcraft, [...]

Andre Norton was at the very start of her career as a novelist in the early 1950s.  By the time of her death in 2005 at the age of 93, [...]

Odysseus’s episode inside the cave of the cyclops Polyphemos plays an outsize role in Tad Crawford’s On Wine-Dark Seas: A Novel of Odysseus and His Fatherless Son Telemachus. Telemachus, the [...]

There is an elegiac quality to Kathleen Naureckas’s 2012 poetry chapbook For the Duration. The title is a reference to the phrase she remembered in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, during World [...]

Relatively early in Christopher Moore’s heartwarming tale of Christmas terror titled The Stupidest Angel, he notes: According to the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, you had [...]

There are a goodly number of alternative-history novels that imagine what life would have been like if Hitler had won World War II, and I’ve read my share. Three of [...]

The tone of C.S. Forester’s 1926 novel Payment Deferred is distinctively light and breezy. Think of the way a great storyteller sitting at a campfire might spin a tale about [...]

I first read Robert A. Caro’s Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson in the spring of 1990, right after it was published.  I mean to say, I gobbled [...]

This is kind of embarrassing.  I was about two-thirds of the way through Irish Murdoch’s 1961 novel A Severed Head when I saw in passing a reference to it as [...]