Old Smiley

This collection of  nonfiction essays by George Saunders is one of the best things I’ve read lately. Saunders takes an off-kilter, tongue in...

This novel of ideas doesn’t work for me. A billionaire capitalist vs. environmental activists. The billionaire is the bad guy, though he nea...

I am honored and pleased to receive this award. I am humbled by the names of those who received it before me. This award recognizes, I think...

Usually, the best super hero films are about origins.   Captain Marvel (2019; dirs. Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck) is definitely an origin story....

Fellini’s great film 8 1/2 (1963) is a dreamlike, surreal vision of a director, Guido Anselmo (Marcello Mastroianni), at mid-career and mi...

Orwell describes this book, published in 1933, as a study in poverty. By this he means his own poverty while living as a young man in Paris...

In this three-hour film,  Avengers: Endgame  (2019; dir. Joe Russo, Anthony Russo), the first hour is relatively slow. Then things speed up...

American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race , by Douglas Brinkley (2018), interweaves a biography of the president with the...

The New York Times review suggested that Bumblebee (2018; dir. Travis Knight) was, at last, a “good” entry into the Transformers film fran...

I liked Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018; dir. Phil Johnston and Rich Moore) better than the original Wreck It Ralph . Both are about 1980s...

One way to describe Susan Orleans'  The Library Book (2018) is obsession.   Another is free association.   The catalyst for the book i...

Margaret Louise Caruthers Ruppersburg died on February 22, 2019, at the age of 91. Most recently she resided at St. Anne’s...

The controversy surrounding The Green Book (2018; dir. Peter Farrelly) mainly centers on how the film enacts a pattern often seen in films...

Maurice Bendrix is one of the angriest narrators I’ve encountered. He’s angry at his dead lover, Sarah Miles, for abandoning him.   He’s an...

Like many murder mysteries, The Dry by Jane Harper (2017) begins with a murder—a brutal triple murder:   a farmer, his wife, and their tee...

In Fever Dream (2014), by Samanta Schweblin, who knows what is happening?   It’s not enough to say nothing is what it seems.   There’s no b...