Oz Is Not As Down Under As Everyone Thinks It Is
Frank L. Baum's Oz isn't in the land of Aussies, as one might think, but in a far more magical setting.
24 Oct 2016
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Is Laura Wilder's 'Little House' Series Right for Kids These Days?
Should the fact of Laura Wilder's dated prejudices lead us to abandon Little House and its sequels?
12 Mar 2014
Escapism Meets Dark Fantasy in This Startling Debut
Royden Poole is having a very bad day. Strong armed into investigating a break-in, the theft of everything but a half million dollars in unmarked bills, two missing-persons cases and a shooting with no body, all he wants to do is go back to pretending to be dead.
Raymond E. Lee
Books
08 Oct 2013
Lenny's Scuffles
An autobiography that includes stealing from priests, going to the navy with Artie Shaw and fighting the law (Dead Kennedys style, somewhat).
17 Jun 2013
Stories Still Scary Enough to Tell in the Dark
A boy who finds a big toe while digging in his backyard, morbid songs about the decomposition of human corpses, a dismembered head...
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30 Oct 2012
Here, There and Everywhere by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey
The Beatles boy wonder sound engineer Geoff Emerick reel-to-reels in the years and makes tenderloin out of some sacred cows in the process.
Carl Schonbeck
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05 Jan 2012
Ernest Hemingway, Reporter
The years spent as a reporter painting the scene in Parisian cafes and on tuna fishing boats in Spain sharpened Ernest Hemingway's ability to carefully, confidently build a story.
30 Aug 2011
Somewhere Over the Technicolour Rainbow Lies the Weirdest Book I Own
Two brief, random glimpses -- cautionary or otherwise -- into what happens when celebrity gets too close to the ragged edge of reality.
14 Jun 2011
S.E. Hinton Is Writing About Vampires, Too
Borders liquidation sale turns up the S.E. Hinton novel Hawkes Harbor; proof of the maxim that if you don’t use it, you lose it.
20 Apr 2011
Of Writing Men: David Remnick’s 'King of the World'
Last year, David Remnick received huge attention for The Bridge, his biography of Barack Obama. Eschewing the conventions of the form, the New Yorker editor focussed not on Obama’s private life but his public rise to senator and eventually president of the United States. It is a trick he also employed in 1998’s King of the World, a biography of another African-American icon, Muhammad Ali.
03 Apr 2011
Botticelli, Sandwiches Outside and Dreams of Bradbury's 'Dandelion Wine'
Boxed in by bandage-colored cubicle walls in downtown Manhattan, my thoughts drift to sweet days in Florence and Rome, and to lines in Ray Bradbury’s ‘Dandelion Wine’.
21 Mar 2011
Growing Up Weird with the Guinness Book of World Records
Mills revisits fond memories of reading the Guinness Book of World Records as a child (it sure beats Nightmare on Elm Street), and the lasting distortion the series has wrought upon her life.
25 Feb 2011
Why Jane Austen makes a surprisingly decent sleuth... and why Elizabeth I may not.
In Jane and the Stillroom Maid, The Devonshires provide the emotional flourishes, Mr. Collins provides the comedy relief, and early-19th-century medicine the fascination that drives this increasingly dark murder mystery.
20 Jan 2011
'Forbidden Colors' Shades of Conformity, Manipulation, Shallowness, Infidelity and Revenge
The characters throughout are, for the most part, miserable, with the gay characters the most miserable of all.
21 Sep 2010
'The Detroiters' Captures Motor City Advertising, 'Mad Men' Style
A 50-year-old copy of a pulp fiction novel on advertising in Detroit is the starting point for an investigation into a bit of late 20th-century pop culture.
20 Jul 2010
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