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 [...]
On September 9, 2017, I wandered over to Westminster Abbey because I was in London for the first time seeing the sights and I knew it was chockful of a [...]
Pauline Saliga, executive director of the Society of Architectural Historians, echoes Etta James to say “at last” to the arrival of Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975 (the Monacelli [...]
When you long for something, when you dream about finding something, you’re hoping. The word “hope” in this sense doesn’t appear in The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma [...]
Christian beliefs, theology and history are rooted in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as well as the Acts of the Apostles, the twenty Epistles and the Book [...]
In my early 20s, I read a lot of Ed McBain 87th Precinct books. There was a detective who had a white streak through his hair from an old wound, [...]
Some random thoughts about John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8, published in 1935: Unmentionables O’Hara seems to go out of his way to mention everything that, in polite society of 1930s America, [...]
Rincewind, the not very good wizard (or “Wizzard,” as his pointy hat says), is fleeing from gaol on the continent of XXXX, a place that’s pretty much unknown to the [...]
With its photo of the hair-blown actor Bjorn Andresen on the dust jacket and its striking, in-your-face, black-and-white photographs of penises at the beginning and end of the book, Germaine [...]
