Brad Zellar The history of literature—up to and including the stuff piled on the new arrivals tables at your local bookstore—is crammed with oddballs and anachronisms. That said, it’s still a rare novel that can take such raw materials and make something truly funny, compelling, and moving out of them. Based on the early reports, Tod Wodicka’s … Read more
Hot on the heels of the birth of Christ comes yet another assault on religious belief. God knows, the godless have been on the pop culture offensive of late (see: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Philip Pullman et al.), and if the other side of the barricades didn’t have such an overwhelming historical foothold, you could … Read more
A lot of folks around town thought there was something special about Richard Kunkel. Big things were expected of that poor fellow. Certainly no one believed that such a fine, bright boy as Richard Kunkel would stick around a tiny little jerkwater village like ours for the rest of his life. Many assumed Kunkel would … Read more
What the hell? This is what we’ve been waiting twenty months for? Here’s the lead from CNN: "Illegal steroids have been in widespread use in Major League Baseball for more than a decade and used by some of the game’s top stars, former Sen. George Mitchell said in releasing a report Thursday." Excuse me while … Read more
It was an old, quiet horse, the color of gray corduroy, or child’s clay, those elephant slabs wrapped in wax paper that Reston remembered from classrooms in his childhood. Six months earlier the horse had been delivered to the pasture out back of Reston’s trailer, and it had taken four men to coax her from … Read more
I don’t recall if the local giant ever actually claimed to have special powers. It did, however, seem to me that he conducted himself as if he had sprung from the pages of mythology. What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that this didn’t appear to be just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill giant. For one … Read more
One night long ago in a once-upon-a-time world there was a little lost dog in a faraway forest. The dog was alone and hungry, and it was a bitter winter in the forest. The little dog was settling into the cold den he had burrowed for himself in the snow around the roots of a … Read more
Here’s what I’d like to know: Since when are the New York Yankees in any position to play hardball with the Twins? Given the pitching situation in New York, and given the fact that this is a team that is now in the (for them) desperate position of playing second-fiddle to the Red Sox, would … Read more
Prentice had changed so much in twenty years. You could stop by the little local historical society at the County Fairgrounds and look at photographs of the way the town used to be, but pretty much every striking thing you would encounter on the walls there had been knocked down –the old courthouse with the … Read more
My family had always been a remarkably insulated and self-contained unit. Despite my parents’ divorces (they divorced when I was eight years old, remarried two years later, and divorced again just after I graduated from high school) there really hadn’t been much in the way of drama or anything you could call real tragedy in … Read more