In broad terms, the Cathar drama was played out between 1150-1250 in the Foix-Toulouse-Albi-Carcassonne-Béziers area of Languedoc. It began with the Cathars’ peaceful rejection of the grasping Roman Catholic Church and its plutocratic... Read More

“Everything vital in history reduces itself ultimately to ideas,” wrote seminal mid-century conservative thinker Robert Nisbet, the subject of this commendably concise and articulate intellectual biography. Nisbet, who died in 1996... Read More

Sometimes what the world offers seems impossible for a person to accept. In the poem, “In the Theatre of Memory,” Perlberg offers the explanation for his book title: “Only months before we entered the impossible / toystore, my... Read More

Walking a tightrope, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, cradling the rope with the insole of each foot, arms extended for balance, each step accompanied by an impending, yet fleeting vertigo, the tightrope walker moves... Read More

“Man, society, and the nation cannot fully exist without an attempt at self-understanding,” writes Kirill Kovaldzhi in an essay describing the state of poetry in Russia at the end of the 1990s, a time when poetry returned to its... Read More

Exploding traditional stereotypes, the Chinese Americans in Leong’s collection of short stories rarely see the inside of a university, let alone become computer geniuses. In the fourteen stories contained in Phoenix Eyes, Leong... Read More

When Ross Ohrenstedt starts his researches for the dissertation on gay writers that should bring him his graduate degree, he is befriended by the wealthy, older gay writer Damon Von Slyke. As Ross begins his cataloging of Von Slyke’s... Read More

It’s like Southern Comfort. It sneaks up on you. Like that first sip of the slow-to-kick-in drink, Cracks begins innocently enough as a sweet-tasting story of sisterhood in a boarding school in South Africa. The kind of school with a... Read More