Julia Keller

Willa Cather, God rest her soul, would be in a tizzy. I can almost see her face in front of me now: the dark eyes bunched into a sort of...

Am I the only moviegoer in America who feels just the teeniest bit sorry for Natasha? Natasha is the girlfriend of Mark Darcy in the No. 1 movie in America,...

There is History and there is history. There is, in other words, the great parade of momentous public events that marches smartly by in textbooks -- "History" -- and then...

Ripeness is all, and ripeness combined with a great golf swing is awesome. Tiger Woods' victory in the Masters on Sunday, his fourth major tournament win in a row, sealed...

Thomas Wolfe claimed he could instantly spot a lazy person: He'd be the hardest-working person in the room. Lazy people, Wolfe wrote, are afraid that others will find out just...

Opera is the way the world would be if it were run by 3-year-olds -- 3-year-olds, that is, with preternaturally splendid singing voices. Like toddlers, operatic characters have simple, urgent...

The title was what first grabbed me: "We Were the Mulvaneys." Such poignancy packed into four words, such longing and melancholy. The secret of that title? The past-tense verb. The...

Simon Winchester orders lunch the same way he writes: forthrightly, with no fuss or hesitation. "Pastrami on rye," he says to the man behind the deli counter. His prose, too,...

Hannibal Lecter is one smart cookie. The character created by novelist Thomas Harris, currently cavorting in the movie version of "Hannibal," is a lover of fine wines, human flesh and...

At first the phrase was deployed only between quotation marks, as if it were a beaker of volatile brew that required tongs for safe handling. The marks swiftly were shed,...