“The debate about reason and faith is a philosophical one, which means any normally intelligent person can participate if he is willing to think and discuss issues as a way of gathering insights,” Burgess Laughlin writes.... Read More

Thirteen-year-old Jason must save his mother after he finds her with a gun in her hand and his dad lying in bed covered with blood. When he hears her screams and rushes to his parents’ bedroom, she is still clicking the empty gun.... Read More

“Alcoholic vagrants die sometimes on the streets of New York City. It’s not unusual,” colleagues tell Peter Branstead, a neurologist at St. Mark’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. But when homeless men continue to show up at his... Read More

“At age fifty-nine, with thirty-seven years of service, there are always goals not completed, challenges where I could have contributed to the solution…But the twinges of regret and loss have been few and far between,” Frederick... Read More

In Ireland, a “keener” is one who sings at a wake, but these aren’t pretty songs to guide the dead to their immortal rest. Rather, they are wrenching laments, crying for a future cut short and family left behind, before the song... Read More

While many novels in this genre start out slow and weave their way toward an exciting climax, this one jumps right into the action and never lets up. Hall has mastered the art of pacing, feathering in just enough detail to ensure that... Read More

The injunction not to judge a book by its cover perhaps became a truism because the tendency to judge books by their covers—by their bindings, sizes, editions, illustrations, colors, paper, and point of sale—was indeed a habit of... Read More

At a national optimism convention Marion S. Freed might not fit in—especially if she toted her elegantly constructed rarely predictable yet ultimately pessimistic collection of four short stories. However calculated however painstaking... Read More