In Terry Pratchett’s 1991 Discworld novel Witches Abroad, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick have an adventure in “foreign places,” in particular, Genua, a New Orleans-ish place that a [...]
On the second page of John Dickson Carr’s first murder mystery It Walks by Night, the book’s narrator, a young American named Jeff Marle, tells the reader that, on that [...]
Halfway through Elmore Leonard’s 1972 novel Forty Lashes Less One, Everett Manly, the fill-in warden at Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona is trying to get two convicts to find some [...]
Back in high school, two years in a row, we had a retreat master who relished the session he did on death. “You will die,” he’d intone in a very [...]
vigilante big flake snow covered the grave and the body they had left in their haste and the strawberry vine grew up from his heart over his neck and into [...]
It’s not for nothing that the front cover of The Book of Genesis, illustrated by R. Crumb carries this warning: ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS And this note: THE FIRST [...]
I’m at a loss about the newly published Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. As a reader, I find that, [...]
By Patrick T. Reardon This essay was originally posted on the 5th anniversary of my lay-off, April 23, 2014. Aside from adjusting the first sentence, I haven't changed it. Ten [...]
The video of me playing basketball didn’t exactly go viral, but it did cause a bit of a stir among my Facebook friends. And, later, it got me wondering about [...]
Rita Locked in her leg braces, she smiles as though the act were a somersault. Patrick T. Reardon 3.25.19 This poem originally appeared in Sparrow magazine in 1977.
