Lisa Birk

A true story of three remarkable Jewish brothers, Tuvia, Zus and Asael Bielsky, who with ingenuity and guts, compassion and enforcement,...

I'm going to assume that you don't need me to outline the plot of a given book. That you're interested in a quick, personal take. I'm...

In Grace Street: A Sister's Memoir of Grief and Gratitude, author Maureen Callahan Smith grants us a window into the way life can...

Let us suppose that an era comes, an era of undetermined length, where words come unmoored from meaning. A word like “compassionate” say....

In the foyer of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson hung maps. All the continents are there, Africa, Asia and so on, cartographed as they were...

We are in tumultuous times and it is easy to dismiss art, music, writing, maybe particularly writing fiction, as a luxury. I think it is...

We write about the other with varying degrees of rigor and success. Homer’s default was narrow (white, male, hetero, warrior), but even...

This spring I nearly declared a moratorium on violent fiction after reading three savage novels: The Orphan Master’s Son, The Sympathizer...

Fail Faster, Succeed Quicker The first time I saw “Fail faster, succeed quicker,” I was at an MIT robotics convention. Don’t ask. The...

The Da Vinci Code is fast paced, a “page-turner.” Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is not. We don’t need Writer’s Digest to define...