What a difference 14 years makes! That’s the amount of time between the publication of Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch (1978) and the appearance of his Rum Punch (1992), both [...]

The Deputy Director of the Unit, a secret laboratory/factory for geniuses, opens the door to Tom Betterton’s quarters and says, “Ah, Betterton — here we are at last! Your wife!” [...]

Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) is both mythic and intimate, and so, too, are the woodcuts that Barry Moser has created for the centennial edition from [...]

One of the many fascinating things about a city like Chicago is how the lives of millions of strangers are, unknowingly, intertwined.  Barry Pearce gets at this in a savvy [...]

The Procession to Calvary, also called Christ Carrying the Cross, is the second-largest painting that Pieter Bruegel the Elder is known to have produced.  Created in 1564, the work measures [...]

Goodness and kindness are ideas that, usually, are widely embraced. We live, however, in an age when meanness, ridicule, deprecation, disparagement, selfishness and the infliction of pain are promoted from [...]

The past is a strange, yet familiar place, and history isn’t a cudgel with which to pound opponents into submission. That’s true of any history. And it’s especially important when [...]