David Budbill’s "Park Songs" is a collection of dramatic monologues, dialogues, and poetic choral pieces spoken by characters who frequent a city park. These people know each other, whether through intimate relationships or by simply... Read More

Years after the death of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, taxi drivers in China began displaying laminated pictures of the Great Helmsman in their vehicles. Believing that his image possessed magical powers that otherwise belonged to local... Read More

The principles of rewards and consequences—along with stories of Pavlov’s dog or the rat in the maze—are such core assumptions in our culture, they’re almost cliché. Susan Schneider quickly moves beyond the cliché, however, in... Read More

When Ann Richards was elected governor of Texas in 1991, she ushered in a “New Texas” by appointing large numbers of women and minorities to government positions. True to Richards’s feminism and progressivism, she “let the people... Read More

The “Robinson” in the title of Kathleen Rooney’s new collection of poems refers to a persona that appears in four poems by Weldon Kees. The “Robinson” poems, as they have come to be known, are widely regarded as being among... Read More

The sheer number of lists that are featured in popular magazines and websites speaks to a cultural fascination with the enumeration (and often, qualification) of all sorts of things—twenty ways to balance your budget, the top ten... Read More

In "The Lantern", an intriguing tale that effortlessly spans time and place, award-winning author Joanne Lewis presents a mystery of Italian architectural history that follows two women’s quests to break free from their past, address... Read More

It’s hard to trust a book based on an Internet meme. The idea seems manufactured, the physical book added on as a way to monetize webviews and retweets. Creating a product afterwards seems like putting the horse before the cart.... Read More