Fiction Reviews
The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flash Fiction from Contemporary China
June 27, 2026Flash fiction, or the “smoke-long story,” or the “skinny story,” as it is sometimes called in...
Crime Fiction
The Right Side of the Tracks
June 26, 2026Detective fiction revels in the possibilities offered by railway travel, but it also expresses some anxiety...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Curses on You, White Men!
June 26, 2026The inhumane acts committed by both sides in this war equal the most heinous crimes of...

Historical Fiction
True Freedom How America came to fight Britain for its independence.
June 26, 2026Can one man create a revolution? While I was working on my novel True Freedom, centering...
History
Notes from Italy: A Homer of the Dolomites
June 26, 2026Some say that the story of the Kingdom of Fanes is an epic that goes back...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Arizona’s Kartchner Caverns
June 25, 2026"Tufts and Tenen saw themselves as guardians of the cave. They were extremely concerned that their...
Art & Design
The Rock Posters of Rich Black
June 25, 2026A photographic essay: The Rock Posters of Rich Black.
Fiction Reviews
Girl Factory by Jim Krusoe
June 25, 2026And, in true Krusoeian fashion, the oddities are delightful. Jonathan, the adult narrator with a childlike...
Non-Fiction Reviews
What the Gospels Meant by Garry Wills
June 25, 2026And if Wills reads as persuasive, it is to himself, if not quite to this reader....
Spain
God’s Crucible by David Levering Lewis
June 24, 2026For English-speaking peoples, 1066 and 1776 still evoke powerful recollections of liberty lost and freedom won....
Non-Fiction Reviews
The Naming of America by John W. Hessler
June 24, 2026But as we travel further and further from established trade routes, things become hazier. The Caspian...
Non-Fiction Reviews
George & Jacintha: On the Limits of Literary Biography
June 23, 2026The claim that George Orwell once tried to rape someone received scant attention in the United...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Christina Binkley on Las Vegas and the Gaming Industry
June 23, 2026"At Wynn Las Vegas, for instance, there is a special and very luxurious entrance for guests...
Fiction Reviews
Hocus POTUS by Malcolm MacPherson
June 23, 2026Satire, of course, does not depend on subtlety. However, there are more effective ways to wield...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Man vs Fish: The Fly Fisherman’s Eternal Struggle by Taylor Streit
June 23, 2026This is the tough time of the year for those such as myself who love and...

Fiction Reviews
BEYOND THE WALK.
June 23, 2026Beyond The Walk. When five young college students trapped in mid-town Manhattan from very different countries...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Worries of a Liberal Conservative
June 23, 2026My friend objects that “Islamofascists” will never change their ways. Sure, there are deadly and dangerous...

Fiction Reviews
Coffee with… Series
June 21, 2026Barnes’s giant of the Western world is short, sharp, and funny, and well worth spending time...

Fiction Reviews
Double Cross – By James Patterson
June 21, 2026I love John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series but always thought that his love scenes were...
Non-Fiction Reviews
My Father’s World
June 21, 2026In my father’s world, books are sacred objects. Authors are to be worshiped, especially those who...
Art
Paul Bril’s Restored Paintings in the San Silvestro Chapel at Rome’s Sancta Sanctorum
August 10, 2026Born in Antwerp in 1554, Bril was working in Italy at the end of the century,...
Movies
In My Father’s Shadow by Chris Welles Feder
August 5, 2026Orson had become so famous for his villainous role as Harry Lime in The Third Man...
Art
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
August 7, 2026The people of that ancient nation had been decimated in the opening genocide of modern times,...
Art & Design
Francis Alÿs: Fabiola at the National Portrait Gallery, London
July 27, 2026Perhaps what fascinated him about these portraits was that they show this urge to create and...
Art
Tim Burton at MoMA
August 11, 2026Predictably, Tim Burton is already a wildly popular show. As throngs of families, film buffs and...
Movies
Movie Review: Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire
August 8, 2026Comedian Mo’Nique, best known for urban comedies like Phat Girlz and Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, gives...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame
August 3, 2026Never perhaps has there been such a masterful account of the man’s failures—and successes—in this country’s...
Art & Design
The Barnes Foundation: Beauty Surrounded by Controversy
August 1, 2026And what a treasure trove! By the time of his death in 1951, Barnes had purchased...
Fiction Reviews
Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
July 31, 2026But, as we see in the terrifying drawings of his radiologist father giving him neck adjustments—“kkrraackk,”...
Movies
Movie Review: The Lovely Bones
August 16, 2026The novel opens with a striking, abrupt proclamation: “My name is Salmon, like the fish; first...










