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No time for Tolstoy? Put Elmore Leonard on your reading list.

Sometimes I think that all Western literature, from Gilgamesh on down, is really about what it means to be a man. That is, Man with a capital M: a mensch, an hombre, someone who is worth the space he takes up. This is the…

When I was growing up in northern New England, I used to try wild apples.

I still miss Laurie Colwin.

Christmas, 1992. We ate a spiced beef roast that I had cured with juniper, allspice and salt for two weeks and a Country Christmas Cake, a heavy, dark fruitcake swathed in marzipan that had been aging since October. I’m sure they were wonderful, but I can’t quite remember how…

An enchanting Odyssey in graphic form

Reading Homer’s Odyssey is something I do once or twice a year. I have taught Homer’s classic…

Haruki Murakami visits a library…and finds a sheep

A young boy finds himself trapped in a bizarre library with a sheep man and a mysterious girl in Haruki Murakami’s illustrated short novel, The Strange Library.

In 1997, the American Film Institute released a list of the 100 greatest American films. The Searchers ranked 96th. This was a scandal.

It is the greatest John Wayne movie, and the greatest Western ever, which means, necessarily, that…

Remembering a legend of world cinema

Prolific Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami died July 4 in Paris, France. During a career that…

“It’s a good thing she’s dead.”

It was my friend Nora on the phone. Not hello, Penelope, this is Nora, how are you? Just “It’s a good thing she’s dead, or I’d kill her.”

I’d bugged Nora to read the Lymond Chronicles, raving that it was the most intense reading experience of my…

The exquisite animal drawings of Gabrielle Vincent

In Les Miserables, it took Victor Hugo 1400 pages and Lord knows how many words to tell his story of cruelty, suffering, endurance, and redemption. A Day, a Dog (1999), created by Gabrielle Vincent, accomplishes the same thing in 60 wordless…