I’m having a difficult time deciding what, dear reader, to tell you first. Let’s put it this way: The streets of Paris, London, Vienna and Berlin in the 1700s and [...]
After By Patrick T. Reardon . After clangor parade, after wailing trombones, teletype drums, clockwork drum majors and majorettes, after cymbal clamor of arena-full horde, pent-up for release, for rebound [...]
Back in the ‘80s, during a holiday get-together, one of the family elders, who was known for sweeping declarations, made a sweeping declaration: “You can’t be a Republican,” she said, [...]
It was nearly 40 years ago that I first read James Agee’s autobiographical novel A Death in the Family. Since then, I have experienced a similarly sudden violent death [...]
There’s much that’s audacious about Roddy Doyle’s new novel Love. There’s the title, first of all. It seems fitting for some sort of Romeo and Juliet story, with or without [...]
One of my favorite poems in Haki R. Madhubuti’s new, career-spanning collection Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language is “Big Momma,” originally published in 1970. Back a half century [...]
Publication of my new book The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago is set for Thanksgiving Day. But you can get an early glimpse of what the [...]
Midway through Terry Pratchett’s 1997 novel Jingo, a conversation takes place between Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson and Corporal Delphine Angua von Überwald. He is a 6’6” dwarf (by adoption) who’s the [...]
Marriage Song Patrick T. Reardon . We exult at the joining of young lives. We dance the dance of joy. . This is a time of merriment. This is a [...]
The shoot-out that ends Elmore Leonard’s 1977 novel The Hunted is just like those in the westerns he was still writing back in those days. Three heavily armed bad guys, [...]
