Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen is a wacky comedy that involves the same detective from Hiaasen's other books, Yancey, but this time he's been demoted to food inspector on the island. Things go from suspicious to weird when Yancey t...

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012), Rachel Joyce’s debut novel, is the deceptively simple tale of a sixty-something-year-old man who steps out of his Devon home to mail a letter but ends up walking to Berwick-on-Tweed...

My love affair with the kingdom of books began in 2003, when I first read Paul Collins’s delightful memoir, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, his account of his family’s attempt to make a go at life in Hay-on-Wye, the or...

  “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” -Saul Bellow Library Warning Quote 5.00/5 (100.00%) 1 vote

I have a little theory that all of the new contenders for the title of ‘Great American Novel’ are required to include an episode of scatological humor. Think of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), in which a young man must sift ...

This time of year is beautiful in the city and, while going for a walk this week, I passed by a gorgeous garden with a chalkboard in the center bearing some of the lyrics to Amy Gerstler’s poem “In Perpetual Spring....