Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Holly Golightly as a name is ironic, because everywhere she goes, she goes loudly. She’s a seeker with only a vague idea of what she hopes to find. She’s also a runaway with a clear […]
Category Archives: The American Novel
Book Review: It by Stephen King
Halfway through Stephen King’s It, I realized that I find neither clowns nor balloons scary, and since they’re the principle devices King use to suggest the supernatural, that aspect of the novel failed to scare […]
The American Novel: Summer by Edith Wharton
I know the mountain. I lived there for two years. We called it Onion Creek, and it’s not much of a mountain, as mountain goes—more of a foothill—but it was an isolated, rural land populated […]
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
To show a man has nothing, give him everything men want. That formula, it seems, had been in my thoughts for as long as I’ve been writer, but I’m uncertain where it came from. It […]
The American Novel: The Natural by Bernard Malamud
During one of my writing classes at Eastern Washington University, John Keeble assigned us to read a novel each by three writers whom we had never read before. I do not remember the other two […]
Book Review: Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ
Chances are, if you live on Earth, particularly in the United States, when I say Ben-Hur, you think Charlton Heston. He starred in the 1959 movie that might’ve been the favorite of your grandmother. It […]
5 Compelling Opening Lines in Historical Fiction
At the risk of stubbing my toe against a cliché, let me tell you to never judge a book by its cover. I wish I could brag that I follow that edict to the word, […]
True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne
Whoever killed the woman had cut her body in half, at the waist, and dumped her naked on the corner of 39th and Norton. Two imperfect homicide detectives pulled the case. Frank Crotty was more […]
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Since war has played a significant role in shaping human society, war novels play a significant role in world literature. The first literature of the western world, the Homeric epic poem The Iliad, narrates an […]
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
Jack Duluoz, Jack Kerouac's fictional alter-ego in Big Sur, felt the need to get away from it all for a few weeks of solitude. A successful writer, whose book The Road had inspired the Beaknik […]