The locations of Shakespeare's plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London, which he and his audience inhabited, but always in...

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in "The Merry Wives of Windsor", he is highlighting the late sixteenth-century belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In "Romeo and Jul...

Shakespeare's plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of...

On August 20, 1940, Marxist philosopher, politician, and revolutionary Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe in his home in Coyoacan, Mexico. He died the next day. In "The Great Prince Died", Bernard Wolfe offers his lyrical, fictionalized acco...

Few of us have had the opportunity to visit Djibouti, the small crook of a country strategically located in the Horn of Africa, which makes "The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper" all the more seductive. In his first collection...

Of all the writings on theory and aesthetics – ancient, medieval, or modern – the most important is indisputably Aristotle's "Poetics", the first philosophical treatise to propound a theory of literature. In the "Poetics", Aristotle writes that he wi...

For nearly fifteen years, writer and musician Ken Waldman has been touring as Alaska's Fiddling Poet, combining old-time Appalachian-style string-band music with original poetry and Alaskan storytelling. The book-and-CD set "D is for Dog Team" is his...

In the wildly entertaining novel "The Blue Soda Siphon", the narrator unexpectedly finds himself back in the world of his childhood: Switzerland in the 1940s. He returns to his childhood home to find his parents frantic because their son is missing....

Over the course of a fifty-year career, Donald E. Westlake published nearly one hundred books, including not one but two long-running series, starring the hard-hitting Parker and the hapless John Dortmunder. In the six years since his death, Westlake...

David C. Ward's first full-length poetry collection combines wry meditations on twenty-first-century life, work and family with observation of America – its landscapes, its history, its politics. Ward's poems are peopled by those who seem never quite...