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 [...]

Chicago doesn’t play much of a role in Rob Wilkins’s biography of his boss, Terry Pratchett, the British mega-selling author of the fantasy-science fiction Discworld series whose life was cut [...]

When you think of it, sending a letter in the mail is a small act of hope.  It’s the same sending a text or an email. You compose your message [...]

The softcover edition of John W. Thomason Jr.’s Gone to Texas is visually striking but, in the manner of many paperbacks, misleading.  Nevertheless, it turned out to be misleading in [...]

Sometime last September, I happened upon a musical called The Wild Party — book, music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa — being performed by the Blank Theatre Company on a [...]

Joshua Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction [...]