Nearly half a century ago, Joanna Russ published The Female Man, a creative, passionate and prescient science fiction novel, as a commentary on the constrained lives of women in human [...]

After a stint as an assistant editor in the Time magazine Chicago bureau, Clair Huffaker began his book-writing career, publishing one novelization of a movie (Cowboy) and eight short western [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]