On October 25, 1865, the ocean bottom a hundred miles off the coast of Georgia received a tribute of $400,000 in gold and silver coins, many of them $10 and $20 eagles and double eagles. Ironically, the coins were on their way home to... Read More

Thank you, Al Capone. Forget the glittering architecture, the kaleidoscopic public gardens, and the urbane cultural attractions. Ever since Prohibition (at least), Chicago has been saddled with a reputation as the crime capital of the... Read More

In England (where the author enjoys higher name recognition as Oxford University’s Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature, author of biographies of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather among others, and a Commander of the British Empire... Read More

It wasn’t until the year 2000 that Alabama voters repealed, by a narrow margin, the section of their state constitution that banned “any marriage between a white person and a Negro or a descendant of a Negro.” Although Alabama was... Read More

These nine engaging, well-turned essays on the writing of fiction reveal this about the author’s working methods in the first few paragraphs: “My habit, when writing about writing, is to proceed by a sort of benign plagiarism. I take... Read More

When Lucile McDonald and Zola Helen Ross founded the Pacific Northwest Writers Association (PNWA) fifty years ago, they could not have imagined, although they assuredly hoped, that their fledgling organization would still be around in... Read More

A tranquil and protected life in the ivory tower is rarely enjoyed by faculty and never experienced by university presidents. Wachman, in his engaging memoir, mentions that being president of Temple University, Philadelphia’s large... Read More

For all twenty writers in this new collection of essays, fire is, inevitably, a metaphor. The metaphors change, however, depending on the writers’ experiences; while some experiences are similar, especially the ones that involve... Read More