Paddy Clarke is a nine-year-old, lower middle-class, small-town Irish boy who turns ten somewhere during the course of Roddy Doyle’s hilarious, revelatory and achingly tender 1993 novel Paddy Clarke Ha [...]
I’m not sure what to say. Larry McMurtry was a highly praised, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and Leaving Cheyenne, his second book, has been described by some fans as his best. [...]
The red-haired cop looks at Ricky Rudolph and, with an angry edge to his voice, asks, “You think Jesus Christ is a joke?” Well, no, Ricky doesn’t, but the cop [...]
Muslims, it seems to me, are onto something when they assert that their sacred text, the Qur’an, the Word of God given to Muhammad in Arabic and later written down [...]
One of the pleasures of reading Aaron Cohen’s 2019 Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power is its walk down memory lane of the great Chicago-based soul [...]
Robot factory By Patrick T. Reardon . Windows broken, robot factory silent, acres of weed-written empty — I flame by on Cain & Abel Highway for Albuquerque, wanting to get where I’m [...]
Some of the 75 essays of flash nonfiction in Fast Funny Women have punchlines, such as “Binging on Ozark” by cartoonist/writer Nicole Hollander. It’s a piece that has to do [...]
When the operation began, the man “went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled.” But the reader knows he will not emerge alive. [...]
Nearly four decades ago, historian Gary Wills explained how Abraham Lincoln used his Gettysburg Address to redefine — rededicate — the United States by enshrining the Declaration of Independence as [...]
Philip Jose Farmer’s 1975 novel Venus on the Half-Shell was based on a gimmick, so it’s not surprising that it’s filled with gimmicks, most of which, to my mind, seem [...]
