I read mysteries. I love the genre, and have done so ever since starting out at a young age with Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot and the rest of them. I wrote a couple myself. They’re a part of my literary heritage. So it was with pleasure that I read an early birthday gift […]

I picked up a copy of “The Anomaly” by Hervé le Tellier at our local bookshop on the basis of rave reviews and touted best-seller status (“more than a million copies sold world-wide”!) I should have known better. It turned out to be what’s known in the lit biz as a “novel of ideas”—look it […]

If you have been living in the Southern California area for a while, you’ll surely remember the Big Rock. It was a media frenzy in its day. News cameras greedily recorded every hiccup in the perilous journey of this massive, 430-ton granite boulder from somewhere in the desert to its destination at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This is one of those books I wanted to like more than I did. Evison is at his best in his evocation of the wild mountain landscapes of the North Cascades in Washington State. The winter winds will chill your bones, you sink into the muddy surface of the meadows in the spring thaw, you hear the rush of streams, the call of birds… Such scenes transport you. All good.

I guess I’m just about as white as you can get. I still recall the trepidation I felt in anticipation of my first visit to Harlem, back in the late 1970s, on an art research project. It’s a good thing I had not read Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem Shuffle” before going there; if I had, I might never have dared set foot in that fabled quarter of New York City… Joking? Not entirely. (I was actually warmly welcomed; never felt a moment of anxiety. My fear was the product of pure prejudice).