Terry Pratchett is writing about a particular kind of madness that can affect human beings, those of heightened sensitivities, such as artists. He’s embodied this mental aberration in a bodiless, [...]
Two images from The Missing of the Somme, the 1994 book by Geoff Dyer about memory and the Great War, now called World War I: Young men, lined up at [...]
In The Penelopiad, her 2005 revisualization of The Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope, Margaret Atwood uses the queen of Ithaca’s twelve maids as a Greek chorus to [...]
Grandma By Patrick T. Reardon . The showers have turned to drizzle. Drops fall heavily now from the black limbs of a bare tree in the glare of the street [...]
In his 2004 Discworld novel A Hat Full of Sky, Terry Pratchett suggests that people “weren’t stupid just because they lived a long time ago.” He’s describing a fictional version [...]
In her new book of poetry Woman without Shame, Sandra Cisneros looks aging in the face and laughs. She laughs at the frenetic lusts and couplings of youth — at [...]
In the epilogue of her astute, significant and multi-dimensional Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer focuses on the work of sculptor Teodoro Ramos Blanco. She writes that, during the course [...]
The Tribune writes the Bible By Patrick T. Reardon . We are not afraid of height. During slack summer, we will write a better Bible. . This will be a [...]
At some point, near the end of Hubert Monteilhet’s The Praying Mantises, one character says to another: “You’re the worst of the three of us.” That’s saying a lot. By [...]
In late 1999, Rick Kogan and I were walking north on Astor Street through the Gold Coast, and, if memory serves, Rick was telling me about long ago summers when, [...]
