The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, by Horacio Quiroga To master the short story is to possess the ability to tersely describe the critical moment, the veritable crux of events, ideas, and emotions—and to capture that moment so that readers can contemplate and appreciate the revealed profundity in these smallest of prose packages. Hector Quiroga—a …
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Sea Of Grass, by Conrad Richter (1936) This very brief (just over a hundred pages, in the edition I read) narrative is a prose poem, a threnody for a lost time and place, New Mexico when it was new in the American imagination. As well, it is a meditation on the mystery of marriage and …
The MONTH at Goodspeed’s Book Shop (May 1930, Vol. I, No. 8), by Norman Dodge Just one of the many delightful issues of the “PAMPHLET concerning books, prints and autographs” found in the famous Boston book store Goodspeed’s Book Shop, this slim staple-bound tract shows off brilliantly the lucent prose of Norman Dodge, whose trenchant …
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The Scarlet Letters & The Glass Village, by Ellery Queen In my notice of (not really) reaching the “500 Books Read” milestone, I mentioned briefly the book we’re looking at today, which consists of two previously published mysteries slammed together in one volume by Signet in an effort to cash in on the seemingly bottomless …
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If you are looking for a Catechism for your young Catholic friend or family member who thinks that The Lego Movie was cool and who might possibly believe that Raiders of the Lost Ark is still relevant, you need look no farther than Kevin and Mary O’Neill’s Catechism of the Seven Sacraments, a comic book …
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I found it to be a perfect novel, with perfect characters, perfect observations, perfect dialogue … up to a point. Call it the Uncanny Asymptote of Nearly Perfect Fiction.
Trigger Warnings: Bestiality, Cannibalism, Rape, Violence, Murder, Torture, Slavery, Sexual Slavery, Cavity Searches, Child Genital Mutilation, STDs, Religion, Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Gardening
Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes, by R. Austin Freeman The impossibly insightful detective is, of course, a staple of the mystery genre, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation being the archetype, though the lineage runs back to Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” in which the mental magic is performed by C. Auguste Dupin. Such a superhuman investigator always manages …
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All I ask from from Wacko literature—be it Conspiracy, Secret Society, or other weirdness—is that it a) make startling claims which are b) supported by intriguing evidence that c) almost makes me a convert. St. Paul in Britain succeeds on all three counts.
The Wind That Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1942, by Anita Brenner, with 184 photographs compiled by George R. Leighton Proponents of revolution—or opponents, for that matter—might soberly consider the course of the Mexican Revolution, the first of the great revolutions of the 20th Century. Like the other revolts in Russia …
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