Julia Keller

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), priest and poet, wrote like somebody who had sneaked too many sips of communion wine. His poems are wild, impetuous, flamboyant. The words fly around like...

When the doctor checks to see if the patient is still breathing, it's disgust, not compassion, that leaks out between his syllables: "You couldn't kill her with an ax," he...

Some nerve. British author R.N. Morris gets credit for gall: In "The Gentle Axe" (2007), a thriller recently released by Penguin in paperback, he channels Fydor Dostoevsky to come up...

All biases aren't created equal. The bad biases, the ones so stupid and illogical and mean-spirited that they blind us to the beauty of the world's bountiful differences, are obvious:...

The horizon is a hard line. The land is stark. The work is tough. Still, "Five Skies," a novel by Ron Carlson first published last year and recently released in...

* aldaily.com: A blaze of light against the dreary dark of myriad blogs and endless blather. This site rounds up the daily best of the Web when it comes to...

Two contests are turning literature into more than just a spectator sport: Breakthrough Novel Award Monday is the last day to vote in amazon.com's Breakthrough Novel competition. Chicago resident Dwight...

Forget the strategic petroleum reserve. The nation's greatest source of potential energy -- powerful enough to light a billion or so homes for a gazillion years, give or take a...

Meg Wolitzer eschews platitudes, shuns homilies and wrinkles up her nose at aphorisms -- but without even trying, right out of the blue and definitely off the cuff, she came...

Check out our new listing of 2008 Tribune book reviews at chicagotribune.com/books. Read new reviews of these books at the same Web site: "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare...