Istvan Hornyak’s Death and Transfiguration: A Tragic Drama in Five Acts is an operatic, intriguing, somewhat misguided, and turgid retelling of the tale of Faust. According to legend, Dr. Henry Faust is a sagacious, peerless scholar... Read More

Julian Black’s debut, A Secret Gay Passion: A Short Gay Erotic Love Story, begins when Nicky is twenty and terrified of someone discovering the fact that he is gay. His family would not accept his sexual orientation, so he lives in... Read More

In comedy parlance, a throwaway joke gets delivered in a casual, easy manner. Its power comes from the lack of emphasis placed on it. A throwaway works only when the comedian or writer refrains from showing any awareness that he’s even... Read More

Alex Caemmerer Jr., a practicing psychiatrist since the early 1950s, claims to be “addicted to writing letters to the editor of the New York Times” about things going on in the United States. While some of those letters—and some to... Read More

With all of the recent political upheaval in Arab nations, it is easy to overlook the fact that a single democratic nation in the Middle East has maintained a stable government for decades: Israel. But Israel has faced problems of its... Read More

Tree nymphs and a banshee are joined by anthropomorphic lizards, flowers, and monkeys in David Frankel’s unusual book, Dragons & Dreams and Other Stories. Dragons & Dreams and Other Stories is a compilation of three individual... Read More

Pain seems pretty straightforward in most situations: injure some part of the body and it will complain bothersomely until it has a chance to heal. But why does an ailing heart sometimes create shoulder pain? How do amputees experience... Read More

Army life on the frontier, regardless of where that frontier is situated, is much the same today as it was for the legions of Rome or the regiments of the East India Company. It is uniformly dull and boring, enlivened slightly by... Read More