Book Review: The Queen's Dwarf
/A quick-witted and bilingual dwarf is planted in the household of England's foreign queen in order to spy on her - but he comes to esteem her, outcast to outcast
Read MoreBook Review: Girl on the Golden Coin
/An exceptional beauty entices King Charles II and ascends to the heights of the Merry Monarch's court
Read MoreBack to the Pulps in the Penny Press!
/I let my subscription to Asimov’s Science Fiction lapse for a bit, and I was amazed at how bleak the lapse rendered my reading landscape! I renewed as soon as I felt this, and today when I jammed my hand into that most bountiful of all orifices, the mighty Open Letters Monthly Post Office box, [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Waking Engine
/In an amazing science fiction debut, a New Yorker awakens in a strange new world
Read MoreBook Review: The Counterfeit Agent
/CIA super-agent John Wells needs to get back in the field and feel the old adrenaline pumping again - but will his latest adventure (featuring a dastardly nuclear plot and a shadowy female operative with a Biblical code-name) be more than he bargained for?
Read MoreMystery Monday: The Crimson Patch!
/Our book today is The Crimson Patch, a 1936 murder mystery by the indomitable Phoebe Atwood Taylor, starring her recurrent character Asey Mayo and set, as all her fans know and love, on that sacred patch called Cape Cod. The Cape is a little hooked spit of land jutting out from the coast of [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Faisal I of Iraq
/A key figure in the founding of the modern Middle East finally gets his definitive English-language biography
Read MoreBook Review: The Dream of the Great American Novel
/The Scarlet Letter? Moby-Dick? Gone with the Wind? Gravity's Rainbow? Just what IS the "Great American Novel" anyway?
Read MoreA Hilltop on the Marne!
/Our book today is a grim but charming little 1915 gem called A Hilltop on the Marne by Mildred Aldrich, an amplified collection of letters she wrote back to the United States after she moved to France and then specifically to Huiry, a little hamlet overlooking the Marne river. Aldrich had thought to “withdraw from [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Depths
/Jonathan Rottenberg's new book contends that the modern world's epidemic of depression is made all the worse by society's tendency to stigmatize the victims themselves
Read MoreBook Review: Dancing Fish and Ammonites
/Long-time novelist Penelope Lively turns 80 - and turns to memoir-writing
Read MoreSexy Stendhal!
/Our book today is Le Rouge et le Noir, the great 1830 novel written by Marie-Henri Beyle under his world-famous pseudonym Stendhal. Actually, our book today is an English-language translation of Le Rouge et le Noir, and not just any translation, oh no! Our translation today is one I came across just recently (at my [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Raiders of the Nile
/In Alexandria as a young man, Gordianus the Finder gets caught up in an elaborate scheme to steal the corpse of Alexander the Great!
Read MoreDeath in the Ashes!
/Our book today is Death in the Ashes, a murder mystery by Albert Bell, the fourth in his delightful “Notebooks of Pliny the Younger” series starring, obviously, the famous first-century author and imperial kiss-up Pliny the Younger, here ably assisted (and mocked the whole time) by the even-more-famous historian Tacitus. Both of them are comparatively [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Martian
/An unassuming botanist gets separated from his exploration team and finds himself stranded alone on Mars - and his survival rests entirely in his own hands.
Read MoreBook Review: Hundred Days
/The vivid story of the months when the long, slogging stalemate of the First World War exploded into violence
Read MoreIn Paperback: On Reading "The Grapes of Wrath"
/John Steinbeck's bestselling and universally-lauded novel gets a passionate and persuasive reading by a renowned Steinbeck scholar
Read MoreBook Review: Must Love Dukes
/The lovers in Elizabeth Michels' new novel get off to a rapturous, then a rocky start - and when next they meet, a year later, the real games begin
Read MoreBook Review: Much Ado About Jack
/A strong-willed countess and a dynamic sailor become Shakespearean-style star-crossed lovers in Christy English's latest novel
Read MoreBook Review: Romancing the Duke
/The daughter of a famous novelist has her own life take on a decidedly fairy-tale twist in Tessa Dare's new novel
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