With its strangeness and ambiguities, with its dreaminess and veiled threats, Carson McCullers’s 1948 novel The Member of the Wedding has the feel of a book-length prose poem. Certainly, a [...]
Near the end of last Saturday at this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest, an 80-year-old Italian painter from the North Shore told me she’s going to have a huge party [...]
It’s something of a surprise to be reminded that Oscar Wilde — the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and the subject of a scandalous 1895 trial over consensual [...]
Ask the average American, and you’d most likely find that the British royals have a pretty dopey reputation. For nearly half a century, there have been all these tabloid stories [...]
The American culture celebrates the rich and powerful. Just look at the news and notice how much is about entertainers and politicians and millionaires and billionaires. On Labor Day, though, [...]
In late 1972, Ed Marciniak, a perennial social critic and justice activist, became president of the Institute of Urban Life, a small program affiliated with Loyola University Chicago. He had [...]
Kate Wilhelm envisions a community of clones as a really dysfunctional family. Wait, that’s not quite right. In her 1976 science-fiction novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, she envisions [...]
When I used to come to the door at my granddaughter Emma’s house, she’d hide, usually behind the legs of her mother or father, peeping out on one side or [...]
A book means something different to an author than it does to a reader. Actually, each reader has a personal experience of the book, different in small and large ways [...]
In the final pages of his adroit and illuminating 2012 book Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, Laurent Dubois brings Ricardo Seitenfus onto the stage. In December, 2010, Seitenfus — a [...]
