The European conquest of the United States began in 1492, when Columbus dropped anchor off the coast of an island he named San Salvador. Historians often date the end of the conquest as December 29, […]
In 1968, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris stood as one of the few government-funded and operated tributes to cinema in the world. Henri Langlois, who cofounded the organization in the 1930s, still ran it. During […]
Good novels read themselves; bad novels require work. Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever, a bad novel, required work. In fairness to the novel, as a historical romance, it’s not the genre I often read. But I […]
As a new nation, America lacks a national epic. We do not have an Iliad or a Gilgamesh Epic or a Beowulf to connect us to antiquity, to a time before written language, to the […]
It’s been a goal of mine–unsatisfactorily fulfilled–to include in these pages reviews not only of novels from my own country, but also those written overseas. A culture can become myopic if it views the world […]
Though set in modern times, when Putin is president of Russia, Red Sparrow reads like a Cold War spy thriller. As Jason Matthews, the novelist who wrote it, tells us in the narration, although the […]
There’s a theory–I’m not saying I subscribe to it, but it’s out there–that you can judge the times by the horror stories it tells. In my childhood and youth, stories about ghosts and vampires–life after death–prevailed. […]
Unfortunately at the movies last weekend, I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie based on Annihilation. Since I wanted to review the novel before I knew a lot about the movie, I’ve been avoiding […]
We need to get fear back into the vampire tale! I thought that back in 1990. Maybe it was 1991. I’m not sure, because I didn’t write these things down back then like I do […]
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 […]
