Elizabeth Taylor

Look up "grandmotherly" in Webster's Dictionary and you will find the words "kindly, indulgent, solicitous." Look in our pages this week and you will find definitions that defy the stereotypes:...

Diet crazes are inescapable: Atkins, South Beach, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers. Fitness centers are everywhere too, catering to desultory Pilates participants or hard-core gym rats. Yet Americans are fatter than...

Tour guides like Mary McCarthy or Edith Wharton infuse Italy with a special magic, Los Angeles comes vividly alive through Joan Didion and, closer to home, an excursion to Wicker...

Birds in the Hand: Fiction and Poetry About Birds Edited by Dylan Nelson and Kent Nelson North Point Press, 374 pages, $24 Kent Nelson, author of the novel "Land That...

Sometimes it pays to hang out in saloons. That is how Rick Kogan happened upon this week's cover story. It was one afternoon in November when Kogan came across George...

We pay a lot of attention to the cover of this magazine. Cover images have a great burden to bear: We want them to draw in new readers who might...

If this letter to readers is lacking any snap in the future, you may have Jean Rudolph Scott to blame. After a long newspaper career, including a stint as the...

Robert Zimmerman has written more than a dozen mysteries under the name R.D. Zimmerman, an array of children's books under the name Alexander Wacker (Wacker Drive is named for his...

Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books By Paul Collins Bloomsbury, 246 pages, $14.95 paper The village Hay-on-Wye is a fantasyland for book lovers. This memoir takes readers to...

When Howard Reich was a piano major at Northwestern University's School of Music in the 1970s, he marveled at Herbie Hancock's talent, and later was haunted by his music from...