Louise Penny has done it again. Magic. Wonderful, captivating, heart-pumping, edge-of-the-seat magic. In her ninth Chief…
Playing St. Barbara by Marian Szczepanski is a great book, a stunning debut novel that shimmers with unforgettable characters while casting necessary light on a dark chapter in American history. Drawn to the social and political history of coal mining in southwestern…
There was a great piece in the New York Times Book Review last weekend, about writers reviewing other writers’ books (Are Novelists Too Wary of Criticizing Other Novelists?).
In the piece, Zoe Heller argued that it is hard to write a bad review —…
Mary Shelley wrote the most famous monster story of all time, Frankenstein. Or did she really? That question is just one of the literary mysteries explored by Lynn Shepherd in her mesmerizing novel, A Fatal Likeness. Was Percy Bysshe Shelley insane or cruelly narcissistic or simply…
I have a weight on my conscience, one shared by book lovers worldwide. The weight is the overflow of books that I have purchased, but have yet to read.
The poor books! There they are, just sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read. I bought those books with a plan…
