Julia Keller

Everybody loves freedom. Everybody also loves "Freedom," the novel by Jonathan Franzen that did to the literary world this year what Angelina Jolie or George Clooney must do to a...

He could eat 12 fried eggs at a sitting. He had "a profound enjoyment of anything rocky, slimy, hardscrabble and dangerous," as Edmund Morris writes. He was passionately fond of...

The "NCIS" team can call it a day when the bad guy's in handcuffs. But the team behind the "NCIS" team — the writing staff of the top-rated CBS drama...

Lee Sandlin may tell you that he approached the Mississippi River just as he has any other subject in his long career as a Chicago-based reporter and essayist. He may...

It's one of the great scenes in American literature: Caroline Meeber is leaving her small, uninspiring hometown in the rural Midwest in 1889. She boards the afternoon train for Chicago....

Because the new memoir by Heather Sellers is so accomplished, because the story it tells is so exotic and yet somehow so familiar, too, and because the writing is so...

Everything I believe about the art of criticism, give or take a few aphorisms and a stray platitude or two, I learned in the course of an elevator ride in...