The India infusing this promising first novel is already a phantom, an incense shrine to a secondary source. Its naïve narrator, Leela, knows her homeland only through the lush, imported spices sold in her parents’ Kenya shop. When... Read More

A tattered copy of an old Argentine cowboy fable of dusty death gives this lively novel its borrowed title, but its code of male fighting honor has a vernacular homeboy sound. This code is very much at home in both Chicago’s rich... Read More

Novels awash in the arcane archeology of lost medieval manuscripts have become their own sub-genre, with Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose being the keystone tome of the art of book-lore display. For bibliophiles (the ideal readers),... Read More

The best barometer to appreciating the long, strange road trip of Eddie & Bella may be gauged from its wake of patchouli oil that is Bella’s oft-remarked signature scent. (Eddie’s bottled essence would mix unleaded gasoline,... 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

The literary feminist fable, for all its PC piety, is hardly a foolproof genre. All too often its didactic intentions succumb to humorlessness, and lifeless, allegorical plotting overtakes the flesh and blood characters. Witness no less... Read More

Like its sister arts of sculpture and dance, painting lives in an intensely physical, eternally present, but silent universe, visually inviting, but slightly alien to self-description. Its own internal language is made of images, and... Read More

A two-sentence biographical aside in Suetonius—how Julius Caesar, age twenty-five, en route to Rhodes, was abducted by pirates, ransomed and released, then revenged when, still as a private citizen, he confiscated his captors’ bounty... Read More