Writing in an elegant style about dark topics, the author invents a shadowy world, in which a sunny summer in 1950s France isn’t quite as idyllic as it might sound. The narrator of this tale is eighteen-year-old Diedre, an American who... Read More

The secret of the Brit’s love affair with language is that speaking is inherently a sensuous act. Thousands of tiny muscles and nerve endings fire exquisitely to release a single word with its shape and eminence. Classically educated... Read More

“Perhaps His Excellency’s (George Washington’s) was indeed a charmed and divinely protected life, as many of his soldiers believed … .” During the French and Indian war he had been shot at point blank and missed and during the... Read More

It’s like Southern Comfort. It sneaks up on you. Like that first sip of the slow-to-kick-in drink, Cracks begins innocently enough as a sweet-tasting story of sisterhood in a boarding school in South Africa. The kind of school with a... Read More

“A middle-class teacher and her working-class student face each other in a large, drafty, grimy high school. The walls had been a bilious green once, before they acquired so many smudges that they took on a dappled look. The stairs are... Read More

The heretics in question are the Cathars, a self-contained, anti-clerical sect made up of Believers and Perfecteds. The author is a lapsed Catholic freelance writer deeply interested in them. Believing in a world in which good and evil... Read More

History can be enchanting. Too often it is relegated to forensic inquiry, where vast armies and larger-than-life characters engulf simple lives, at which point all present-day relevance can be lost. The genuine stuff of history, though,... Read More

The pose Caswell strikes most often is that of a maimed but tough survivor, like his three-legged dog. Rarely pretty, often slightly warped and quirkily funny, these poems manage to sing in their own edgy way, to lament and to celebrate... Read More