I’m not sure how old I was when I first read Andre Norton’s 1952 novel Daybreak 2250 AD.  In an essay about the book that I wrote for the Chicago [...]

African American lovers Beatrice Verdene Chapel and Jim Waters are the central characters in Jasmine Elizabeth Smith’s anguished, violent, blues-infused poetry collection South Flight, published by the University of Georgia [...]

Armand Degas — a middle-aged Ojibway-French Canadian, also known as Blackbird, also known to his increasing irritation as Bird — waits for another chicken pot pie to bake while Donna [...]

In the 1955 novel Murder in the Navy, the killer is an evil presence operating in the shadows.  But he’s not hidden from the reader, even though his name isn’t [...]

I knew ahead of time the solution to the puzzle that Fredric Brown’s on-the-wagon Chicago reporter Bill Sweeney was trying to solve in The Screaming Mimi, and I still found [...]

As I was finishing John Grisham’s 1992 gripping legal thriller The Pelican Brief, I found myself warmly enjoying its reminder of how wonderful newspapering used to be. The novel starts [...]

Robert Ludlum had a knack for writing successful and very popular thrillers, producing 27 books with a total of somewhere between 300 million and 500 million copies in print.  That [...]

Some background:  More than four centuries ago, during the Protestant Reformation, Scottish reformer John Knox published, while exiled in Switzerland, a small 20,000-word book that has kept his name alive [...]

I suspect that Charles Dickens was in a pretty foul mood when he wrote "Hard Times" in 1854. He draws stark differences between the "good" people and the "bad" people [...]