“ … I traveled through the Caucasus like a perfect vagabond,“ wrote Kennan, noting he one day journeyed with a prince, the next with a pauper … one day dined in state, the next subsisted on raw turnips. At twelve Kennan was a... Read More

Worship is a hot topic in evangelical Christian circles these days. Worship music in particular enjoys immense popularity: believers are seeking out recordings, live concerts, and even books by their favorite musicians in hopes that... Read More

For the Ryans, poetry, like meditation, like life, is all about breathing. In this strange hybrid of poetry, meditation, and self-help, the husband-and-wife authorial team pairs each haiku with a guided meditation sequence, urging... Read More

Norman Mailer once wrote about the “nobility” of the baser forms of speech. The author, in this engaging memoir of wanderlust, demonstrates how it works: “Before the sun reaches the horizon it is absorbed by a thick brown haze that... Read More

“She is no copyist of another’s skill: she has now a name for herself—she is one of our national glories—our Sedgwick.” So claimed Mrs. E. C. Embury in The Ladies Companion of 1835. During a career that spanned five decades of... Read More

Like Kafka’s The Trial or Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, this novel is a deceptively straightforward puzzler that yields no certain solution. Smith, the single-name protagonist, is so ordinary in behavior and aspirations that it only... Read More

The line between faith and sadism is explored in this comic novel about a gay writer from San Francisco who accepts a speaking engagement as a “Jewish humanist” at a Bible college in Minnesota. When a snowstorm traps him there,... Read More

On October 6, 1951, the author was captured by the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army while fighting in the Korean War. He spent twenty-two months as a prisoner, one of 7,245 Americans captured there. Bassett recalls almost every day of... Read More