Everyone, at least every book lover, has their favorite bookstore. Though mine is Auntie’s Books in Spokane, many others living in the Northwest tell me theirs is Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. All […]
Though The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the first novel by Neil Gaiman that I’ve read, I wasn’t as unfamiliar with his work as I had believed when I read it. With […]
When I travel, I take the train. A few days before Halloween, I found myself at an Amtrak Depot that offered a book exchange. Leave a book; take a book. They had a jar for […]
Around August 4th of this year, Elie Wiesel’s childhood home in Sighet, Romania was vandalized. The vandal spray-painted public toilet and Nazi Jew lying in hell with Hitler and Anti-Semite pedophile across the outside walls. […]
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 […]
