A sustainable suspense novel must keep the reader guessing throughout never knowing more than the accompanying characters. The premise of Dodd’s novel is certainly suspenseful: an esteemed art critic is unwittingly drawn into a broad... Read More

“Because she was as white-skinned as the moon and he was something akin to the color of red clay,” Martha Clarke plays a role as archetypal as Medea, or Ophelia. Her obsession with Reuben Sweetbitter, a half-Choctaw drifter, is met... Read More

This book is a remarkable piece of literary historical recovery. The author traces the rise and development of African American literary societies from the pre-Civil War era to the Harlem Renaissance, and shows how those societies... Read More

In Welcome to the Dreamhouse, University of Southern California professor Spigel changes the terms of television criticism in a collection of essays that range from the surprising to the sublime. Rather than restaging the dusty argument... Read More

Fresh on the heels of winning the 2000 Benjamin Franklin Award for Young Adult Fiction for The Crouching Dragon (a Harry-Potterish bit of magic realism set in a haunted French castle), comes a slightly more grounded use of European art,... Read More

This biography of oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny reads like a novel, and fittingly so. For the life story of this brilliant, driven entrepreneur is the stuff of fiction, blending the quintessentially American rags-to-riches saga with... Read More