A small, rural town in north-central lower Michigan, Idlewild is barely a wide spot on U.S. Highway 10, with very little to separate it from the blur of other near-ghost towns on the upland of the Manistee National Forest: a shuttered... Read More

Some of John Keats’s letters are nearly as well known, at least among scholars and professors, as his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Ideas like “negative capability” (“when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries,... Read More

Here is a dazzling exploration of espionage—“the art of the possible” in “a wilderness of mirrors.” The narrative surges forward from the peril-fraught Berlin of the 1950s through the doomed Hungarian Uprising, the botched Bay... Read More

Dante’s words from Purgatorio open this volume: “Mid-way this life’s journey, I came to myself in a dark wood?” This wood, under devious machinations, becomes the Dark Would of the title, a search for self and divinity through... Read More

In 1879, “an octagon turret or gun-room, nine feet in diameter and ten feet high—holed for rifles” was built as part of an office fortress at Yellowstone National Park. Previous events, such as the Nez Perce War in 1877, had... Read More

“Pollen, dust, animals, all these make me sneeze. I am done in by innocent things,” says a father who will never support his family, in the cleverly constructed short story “An Afternoon at the Movies.” His son imagines a film of... Read More

The trick for any book is to get readers so engrossed that they stop noticing the form. Anyone immersed in a truly fine read probably isn’t thinking, “this story is told in flashback” or “interesting use of the unreliable... Read More

Locking eyes with her viewer, a nude woman nests heavily in the tousled sheets of her four-post bed. Over the casual slump of her shoulder, and with one leg thrown ahead of her swollen belly, her glance casts the ruddy weariness of her... Read More