On the title page of David Mamet’s 2018 book, it says: Chicago: A Novel.  It would have been more accurate to say: Chicago: A Myth. The book, well-written and well-paced, [...]

It wasn’t happenstance, I think, that Sidney Callahan’s The Magnificat: The Prayer of Mary and Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin [...]

Sigmund Freud once said that, if you take a widely diverse set of people and starve them, soon all their differences will fall away to be replaced by “the uniform [...]

I’m tempted to say that Lisa Russ Spaar’s novel Paradise Close has a fairy-tale quality to it, but I’m afraid that would give the wrong idea. That might suggest that [...]

In April, 2014, right after Terry Pratchett’s 40th Discworld novel Raising Steam was published in the U.S., I read it and reviewed it on my website.  And loved it. Now, [...]

Seven years after Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize, she published Twilight Sleep which tells the same story from a different perspective. In both novels, the [...]

Les Savage Jr.’s 1958 novel Beyond Wind River begins: Just outside of town Frank Ives caught up with the wagon carrying the dead man. The dead man is Peter Thayne, [...]

The meeting in the port city of Guayaquil in what is now Ecuador on July 26, 1822, was a striking moment in world history although, in import, it was little [...]

After the 87th Precinct detectives took the killer downstairs to the detention cells, they sat in the squadroom, quiet and thoughtful. “Why do you suppose he put on the dead [...]