Last evening I was talking with two poet friends about the term ‘niche writer.’ We agreed that formula prose is a lesser sort of creation,
Eyes, Stones is the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ 2011 Walt Whitman Award, an honor given to American poets who have not previously published
If you have seen many of my “Bookin’ with Sunny” reviews, you’ll know I prefer books that not only are delightful to read but that
To kids growing up in the 1950’s, the name Mary Martin meant just one thing: Peter Pan. This was a television re-creation of the 1954
A Beautiful Place to Die brings to life a 1950s South Africa, when new apartheid laws have just been enacted and when justice is in
Belshazzar’s Daughter, the first of a series highlighting Inspector Cetin Ikmen in each novel, is a police procedural set in modern-day Istanbul. Just like policemen
The eight short stories in Mark Maynard’s collection, Grind, all take place in Reno, Nevada; not the Reno where I live but the other Reno,
Sometimes, when you open a book and begin reading, you’re totally surprised. Expecting one sort of novel, you discover another. That happened to me when
The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers who Reinvented American Literature Midway through The Bohemians, Ben Tarnoff describes “the seed of California humor”
J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, the manic/sad antics of Sebastian Dangerfield, has never been out of print since its first publication in Paris, 1955. Now
Having finished reading Jack Kerouac’s classic The Subterraneans, one feels as though one has been embraced and punched in the guts at the same time.
Imagine Daphne du Maurier, sipping absinthe and smoking pot, while rereading Jane Eyre and rewriting The Turn of the Screw! That is precisely my impression
Noah Charney founded and now directs an international think tank on art crime. The Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA) aids police and
The reader who recalls Frederic Tubach’s and Bernard Rosner’s movingly honest memoir, An Uncommon Friendship, should not pass up Tubach’s latest book, German Voices. The
The Girl on the Road No, this is not a review of Monica Byrne’s fabulous The Girl in the Road (I’m working on that very
Calling a book ‘an academic novel’ is often a kiss of death, but in the case of Martha Woodroof’s Small Blessings, it is a breath
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