Dune by Frank Herbert
Is Dune the perfect novel? Of course, perfection is what every piece of art—be it a painting, a sculpture, a poem, a song, a film, or a novel—strives to be. But what does it mean […]
Category Archives: Book Review
Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham
Deciding her future, Mary Panton spends the summer in a villa outside Florence, Italy. She’s in a contest between four men. One man, her husband, whom she deeply loved, has died. A gambler, he left […]
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Of all the ghost stories I’ve read in my life, The Turn of the Screw is the one that seems most enigmatic, and therefore, it’s arguably the scariest. If the typical ghost story, for example Shirley Jackson’s The […]
The Rhythm Section by Mark Burnell
The world will long remember the dramatic events from August to December 1991, when the Soviet Union—the great antagonists to Western Democracies—collapsed under its own weight. I was living in Denver at the time. Since […]
Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez
Memories of My Melancholy Whores begins with its protagonist and narrator declaring the objectionable goal of wanting to have sex with a teenaged virgin. It’s the gift he wants to give himself for his ninetieth […]
The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry
Where do you begin with a writer like Larry McMurtry? His name, I fear, is not a household name, but his work–from The Last Picture Show (1966) to Lonesome Dove (1985) to the movie Brokeback […]
Book Review: Cinnamon by Samar Yazbek
“Poetry,” one of my literature professors had said long ago in class, “is about mixed emotions.” She was talking about Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” a short poem loaded with both positive and negative imagery […]
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
“The book can’t complete with the screen,” Philip Roth said in a 2009 interview with Tina Brown for The Daily Beast. “It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. it couldn’t compete with the television […]
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johanna Wolfgang von Goethe
According to Wikipedia, when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, it became the world’s first best seller. Since book publishing was, at best, only a toddler, since copyright laws were nonexistent, and […]
Book Review: The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker
Frequent readers will know that I love my horror movies and that I’m constantly searching for new ones to enjoy. So you’ll understand why, back in 1987, when Hellraiser was released, I felt tempted to […]