Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, liked to spend money on herself and on her friends, such as Ma Rainey, a blues mentor, who got into trouble one evening with [...]

For more than 2,400 years, The Histories by Herodotus has been a foundation block of Western civilization, the first work of history in Western literature. Written in classical Greek and [...]

A single paragraph about two-thirds of the way through the book exemplifies the strength and clarity of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of [...]

Technically, Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James is a pastiche inasmuch as it’s a literary work, written in the style of another author, in this case, Jane Austen, that [...]

Okay, Alison Umminger had me at the title.  I’d read her witty little essay in Fast Funny Women, a book of witty little essays, edited by Gina Barreca.  I liked [...]

On the very first page of The Pearl, John Steinbeck signals that this short, tense novel is a parable.  In the context of the story, he explains that it is [...]

Corina is eating her sandwich in the sculpture garden of the Art Institute across the street from the gas company office where she works. A sparrow flits down near her [...]