There is much that is surprising and interesting and fascinating in Paul Kriwaczek’s 2010 book Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization. And much in Kriwaczek’s storytelling that is infuriating. [...]
Actually, Beowulf isn’t a character in Tom Holt’s 1988 comic novel Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? (although that is, of course, a fun title). He’s not even mentioned until a few [...]
Andre Norton’s 1970 novel Dread Companion opens with Kilda c’ Rhyn detailing for the reader the mystery at the heart of her story. She was 16 when she landed on [...]
For me, the high point of my reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice came near the end of the 1813 novel when Elizabeth Bennett receives a letter from her [...]
At the Chicago Tribune where I worked for 32 years, the story of Bill Recktenwald and the parking meters was legendary — and instructive. From 1984 to early 1987, Chicago [...]
In 1958, Gregory Peck starred as the revenge-driven Jim Douglass in the brooding and beautiful western The Bravados. The movie was based on a novel of the same name, [...]
Frank Ryan has his 10 rules, and Stick — Ernest Stickley Jr. — buys into them. The result is very lucrative. Ryan’s Rules was the original title of Elmore Leonard’s [...]
On the night of March 9, 1860, a storm-driven schooner with only 15 boys aboard, ages 8 to 14, crashes into the shore of an unknown island. And so begins [...]
Rarely in literature does there appear someone as vitally alive as Fargo Burns, a character whose chaotically self-destructive actions and courting of danger and fragmenting psyche co-exist with — and, [...]
One of the opening paragraphs of Sam Weller’s short story “All the Summer Before Us” is this: “We were eighteen, me and Dave and Bill; childhood friends on the cusp [...]
