Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, published in Italian in 1975, is a literary memoir of high art and broad ambition. It covers the waterfront. The periodic table, of course, is [...]
On the occasion of this 126th Labor Day as a national holiday, I’d like to make a modest proposal: Let’s have a second one — Labor Day 2 — that’s [...]
Visions By Patrick T. Reardon I see the hand of God write on the wall the sins of the king. I see the bloody knife. I see the father lead [...]
Near the very end of Julia Keller’s latest Acker’s Gap novel The Cold Way Home (Minotaur, 306 pages, $27.99), Jake Oakes wants something that he knows he may never get, [...]
Granny Weatherwax hears a noise outside her witch’s cottage: There was something in the garden.It wasn’t much of a garden. There were the Herbs, and the soft fruit bushes, a [...]
Two-thirds of the way through Raymond Chandler’s novel Playback, Philip Marlowe is having a conversation with Henry Clarendon IV, an aged, wealthy man who spends his days sitting in a [...]
Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folks by W. E. B. Du Bois is an important book of American literature, a significant work in the development of the field [...]
The perfect act outside of Brady's Tavern By Patrick T. Reardon Stop, short the physical. Yes, you know the noxic feel in the deep and up throat and out, and [...]
Two dead men. Long ago, the first tried to kill the second with a horrible torture but was killed by an act of a god. The second lived a long, [...]
On the last page of Elmore Leonard’s 1983 novel La Brava, his title character, Joe La Brava, is told by former screen siren Jean Shaw, “It’s not the movies, Joe.” [...]
