On a rainy night in a crowded restaurant in the Old City, University of Tennessee Professor Robert J. Norrell and I may be the only middle-aged people in the whole …
Listen Up: A Summer Vacation List of Knox Co. Library Audiobooks
Your public library owns more than 22,000 audiobooks. Most of them are compact-disc packages; a few thousand endure on cassette tape. And an ever-increasing portion of them exist as licensed …
Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese Comics Finally Get the U.S. Editions They Deserve
The Italian cartoonist Hugo Pratt introduced his most famous character, the cynical sailor and “gentleman of fortune” Corto Maltese, in 1967. Maltese fit the mood of the times—a classic antihero, …
Stephen King’s New Detective Series Gets Off to a Clumsy Start
Stephen King continues to produce interesting books—and the occasional very good one, like 2011’s 11/22/63—despite a host of narrative tics and stylistic deficiencies that would sink a writer less blessed …
Margaret Lazarus Dean Chronicles the End of the Space Age in ‘Leaving Orbit’
At times as I read Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight (Graywolf Press), I was reminded of Frank Sobotka, the tragically compromised longshoreman and labor leader …