Chatty ghosts, departed sons make Saunders’ contribution to the Lincoln canon worth its words. Abraham Lincoln commands such a presence in American literature, biography and cultural memory that it is difficult to imagine a new and unique contribution to the...
One of the more cogent YouTube replies to In the Event of Moon Disaster takes the form of a quote from Orwell posted by user John Riskin: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Contained within that line are myriad...
I visited Wichita last fall when posters at Watermark Books advertised a book talk by Timothy Egan about his latest, A Pilgrimage to Eternity, at a church just a block away from the bookstore. I was excited to hear him speak; he wrote one of my favorite pieces of...
If you do not believe that a dusty collection of 16 traditional folk songs can be called a concept album, perhaps you underestimate this region’s deep well of banjo tunes about woodland creatures. Wolf Hunter is a concept album by virtue of its curation: the songs...
God Hates. Those are the first words I’ve seen the past few mornings, as this book sits on my coffee table. When I take it to read at the park or the library, I slip off the red, white and blue sleeve into my bag. There’s enough hateful rhetoric going around these...
At the newspaper where I worked in college, we were taught that a story’s lead was a story’s everything—This. Happened. The lead was the whole and the start, an incision through which a writer’s needle and thread might penetrate, stringing along all the details to...
