Life as we know it ceases on death row. Instead, DR prisoners struggle to survive in what one-time inmate, now paroled, Donnie Crawford calls “timeless time,” a surreal existence of suspended life that begins with the death sentence... Read More

The best mystery writers tell succinct stories that feature fast-moving, suspenseful plots—qualities that writers in other genres sometimes fail to achieve. P.D. James once observed that readership of crime novels increases during... Read More

Today’s families tend to gaze upon the childhoods of the 1950s as shimmering weeks of pure kid fun complete with adventure danger limitless candy and minimal parental supervision. A far cry from the scheduled summer weeks of... Read More

Sex espionage penguins and tango feature in John F. Rooney’s fifth novel which deals with a life-changing trip to South America. The author lavishes as much detail on locations including Buenos Aires Santiago Montevideo Punta Arenas... Read More

Drugs don’t kill people drug pushers kill people. That is the core of the argument for an end to legal prohibitions on various street drugs—after all prohibitions never succeed. Remove the profit from the product remove the criminal... Read More

This erudite review of multiple enactments of gender in the wake of “pomo,” or postmodern, theory is an impressive tour de force. Dedicated to “sexual nonconformists and those who love them,” it argues that the “mutually... Read More

Monona Quinn is the editor of the Mitchell Doings, a small-town newspaper that occupies most of her waking hours. At the moment, however, her focus is on death—murder, to be precise. The former-big-city-reporter-turned-editor is no... Read More

Consider the fateful paradoxes of exile that haunted this poet’s fragile yet tenacious lifework. Born Paul Antschel in 1920 to a prosperous Jewish family in Bukovina (grimly ceded to Romania in 1940), he adopted the name Celan after... Read More