Over the years, I’ve written about Scrooge and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol several times. In 2014, I published an op-ed piece for the Chicago Tribune, titled “Was he Scrooge [...]

Toward the end of Elmore Leonard’s 1985 crime novel Glitz, Miami Police Lt. Vincent Mora, rehabbing after being shot in a mugging while carrying groceries, is in a comp-ed suite [...]

The Teddy in Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s new short story collection Sacred City has a way of telling a tale that starts here and ends up there after a [...]

It’s clear that John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella Of Mice and Men was written to be read as a parable.  But a parable for what?  I mean, what’s the lesson it [...]

Stephanie Gangi’s Carry the Dog is an overwrought potboiler of the old school, packed to the brim with modern-day hot-button issues. It’s a lot like the 1966 Jacqueline Susann novel [...]

The Art of the City: Rome, Florence, Venice is made up of four essays that German polymath Georg Simmel wrote between 1898 and 1907, translated by Will Stone and published [...]

Thomas Berger’s 1983 novel The Feud is a screwball comedy which features two killings, a natural death after a fistfight, a botched suicide, a car bomb and a hardware store [...]

Timothy Taylor raises many questions in his 2002 book The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death, and, like any good anthropologist, he doesn’t provide clear-cut answers.  How could he? The [...]