In military and diplomatic circles small wars are operations undertaken under executive authority within certain parameters. In the case of my insights and perambulations for this day, Small Wars (Harper Collins) is the title of British writer/screenwriter Sadie Jones’s (The Outcast) second novel set (mostly) in a British
Alabama-born Andre Williams migrated to Chicago with his parents only to be returned to the South when his mother died in 1943. Finding that comeback infelicitous, he made his way back to his steel-mill-worker father in the Windy City, which is where his troubles began—a brief
If he never published another book, music commentator and cultural historian David Hadju most certainly made his bones with Lush Life, his incomparable biography of the great Duke Ellington collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. Of course he has continued to publish valuable books—Positively 4th Street, The Ten-Cent Plague, and now
OK, first, my initial impression of cartoonist Hans Rickheit’s new book The Squirrel Machine (Fantagraphics) was one of amazement (a word I don’t bandy about indulgently) and bafflement. I am clear I am not grasping something—not an unpleasant feeling in this circumstance. But Rickheit doesn’t do
You might think that receiving rave endorsements from writers such as Milan Kundera (“one of the greatest novelists of our century”) and John Updike (“a master of verbal burlesque…one of the profoundest late moderns” [whatever that means]) would earn Witold Gombrowicz more recognition. More of a following? T-shirts
Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto first called my attention to the distinction between residence and citizenship, pointing out that in France, living in Paris makes you Parisian, not French. I am almost tempted to say the same about residents of New York: New Yorkers first, United States citizens second. Such is
Back when I was an impressionable undergraduate (as opposed to being an impressionable graybeard), I was heavily into German author Herman Hesse (Siddhartha), devouring his oeuvre and other big chunks of world culture (I should add certain drugs were experimented with, in addition to those that I inhaled). In Hesse’
There is already a Tabernacle-size choir singing the praises of Attica Locke’s first novel. Among others, the inestimable James Ellroy and my old pal (I mean that in a Facebook kind of way) George Pelecanos extol Black Water Rising (Harper Collins) as a stylish, involving literary thriller with
There must be some explanation for the fact that it wasn't until 2008 that someone had the clarity of thought to anthologize their well-considered selection of the best writing on the internet. Possibly it is that whatever cabal decides these things was finally overwhelmed by the torrent
Growing up in Chicago in the '50s and '60s, I was not aware of this sprawling prairie city's commitment to racial segregation until Martin Luther King came to the city and led marches for fair (desegregated) housing in Caucasian neighborhoods. For such temerity, the good doctor
