“Trouble is the universal grammar of stories.”

And that is all we need to know about storytelling.

But how much more fun it is to read all about storytelling, and the vital role it plays in our economic, social, romantic, and political lives. Jonathan Gottschall tells…

‘Cry, the Beloved Country’

Having been unable to see the recent Glimmerglass production of Kurt Weill’s opera Lost in the Stars, I instead read the novel upon which it is based, Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. The opera at Glimmerglass, directed by the fabulously gifted Tazewell Thompson, received…

New Fav Author: David Mitchell

Over August vacation, I read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I’d started it back in the spring but the first section of this partitioned book put me off, telling as it did the story of a traveler in the far reaches of the Pacific sometime in the eighteenth century (as best I…

Silences and Consequences of War

Pat Barker is back, with another soul-rending novel set in England during World War I. Regeneration is one of my favorite books ever, and the Regeneration Trilogy, telling the story of World War I poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, will forever be seared into my…

Billy Lynn’s Victory Tour

Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk takes on all the big guns of USA mythology: football, church, and soldiering — and Fountain holds no punches in exposing just how impoverished the culture has become. Billy Lynn is one of a group of Bravo soldiers who took on the Iraqis…