Two-thirds of the way through her insightful and thought-provoking new book The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 336 pages, $29.95), English literature scholar Marion Turner is writing [...]
Cotton Hawes, the new guy among the 87th Precinct detectives, sleeps his way through Killer’s Payoff. I don’t mean he’s asleep while the action takes place. He’s in the middle [...]
On the first page of Frederick Busch’s 1991 novel Closing Arguments, Mark Brennan writes that he is telling the reader of the upstate lawyer, the post-traumatic combat stress, the splendid [...]
Antony Barone Kolenc’s The Merchant’s Curse is a historical mystery with a strong supernatural element, set in 12th-century England and written for children and young teens. Even more, it’s a [...]
Prior to publishing 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus in 2006, Charles C. Mann had co-authored a few books on science and technology. But he had specialized in [...]
It’s a rare book of religious history — to say nothing of one about the cantankerous and violent era known as the Reformation — to be called sprightly. Yet, that’s [...]
Elmore Leonard’s 1991 novel Maximum Bob features, in no particular order: A goofy judge who enjoys giving the hardest time to convicted felons and who comes up with a scheme [...]
Clair Huffaker’s 1958 western Posse from Hell is a book of stereotypes twisted out of shape. It takes, for example, the good guy/bad guy dichotomy and shatters it into a [...]
And, at the 87th precinct house, in the moments after midnight on Christmas morning, a suspect in the squad’s lock-up, like all the others there, heard the cry of a [...]
Goddess By Patrick T. Reardon . The Mexican goddess enfleshed in McDonald’s with a wide smile under her wide mountain nose and her children, all girls under eight, alert to [...]
