Elizabeth Taylor

The Best American Essays 2004 Edited by Louis Menand, series editor Robert Atwan Houghton Mifflin, 323 pages, $14 paper "Many of the essays in this volume were picked by ear....

"All healthy men have thought of their own suicide," Albert Camus wrote. But healthy people, he might have added, rarely act on those thoughts. The confounding riddle of why someone...

Stories come to us in different ways. Usually, they burst out of the news, demanding attention. Or they are conflicts requiring insight and perspective. But stories are also to be...

The Art of Teaching By Jay Parini Oxford University Press, 160 pages, $17.95 Prolific poet, novelist and biographer Jay Parini, whose book on Robert Frost won a Tribune Heartland Prize,...

The tale of the musical prodigy is frequently told, but what of those others-with no special talent, no hovering parent, no single-minded drive-who triumph at making music? You will meet...

Gilead By Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 247 pages, $23 Marilynne Robinson's second novel, following "Housekeeping" in 1981, is a book to be savored one wintry day. In the...

The Quiet American By Graham Greene, introduction by Robert Stone Penguin Classics, 180 pages, $14 paper History may repeat itself, and for just that reason this novel, first published 50...

Pat Reardon has been an Abraham Lincoln fan since he was a 4th grader at St. Thomas Aquinas Elementary School in the Austin neighborhood. "I sat toward the back of...

Risk is an accepted part of life, but when it comes to money, questions emerge about what role a state should play in the riskiest gambit of all-gambling. This week...

As the new year begins, Dave Barry takes a look at the old one. In a few weeks, Dave's last column will appear in the Magazine as he takes an...