Julia Keller

To understand why the hiring of Brian Bannon as Chicago's public library commissioner caused a more-than-ordinary stir, let us quote a learned cultural authority. That authority is not Socrates. It is not Shakespeare. It is not Goethe. Nor is it...

For every kid with a scraped knee, a skinned elbow, a bumped head and a torn shirt — the inevitable result of being very determined not to learn from one's mistakes — Maurice Sendak was your man. For every kid who builds forts out of old...

During an appearance in late December on CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight," Jane Fonda was asked which man from her past she would choose to accompany her to a desert island. Would she select a famous ex-spouse like Ted Turner or Tom Hayden? Or would this...

Some marvelous novels vigorously refute the idea that so-called "literary fiction," the serious stuff, must be a tedious chore to read, like a bad-tasting medicine whose healing properties are somehow confirmed by the fact that you want to spit it out,...

He loved lists, so let's make one in his honor. The late John Leonard was brilliant, witty, earnest, brave, erudite, stubborn, poetic and totally smitten by literature. I never met him, but I can swear to the foregoing because I read his work for many...

Before I read "The Translation of the Bones" (Scribner) by Francesca Kay, I had three favorite novels on spiritual topics. Now I have four. Kay's fiercely lyrical yet exceedingly tough-minded novel about a tragedy precipitated by a would-be spiritual...

She's got the look. She's also got the walk, the talk and the wardrobe. When Michelle Williams pouts and flounces and oozes her way across the screen in "My Week With Marilyn," giving herself unreservedly to the role of a tormented yet still-alluring...

When Tasha Alexander strolls the streets of Chicago, she doesn't much see Wrigley Field or the Chicago River. She sees St. Paul's Cathedral and the River Thames and Belgrave Square and hansom cabs. Alexander's imagination is perpetually tuned in to...

It was time. The chair had begun to sag in multiple places, its stamina and flexibility fatally compromised by the repeated sittings and risings, and sittings and risings, of its most frequent (and, as the French so delicately put it, "well-seated")...

How'd they do it? That is often thought to be the primary motivation behind our fascination with the life stories of business behemoths: a curiosity about the means — both noble and scurrilous — by which mammoth fortunes are made. "Steve...

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) knew his way around two things: rock-hard prose and stone-cold corpses. He was a wizardly writer of mysteries, a man who could ratchet up the menace and dread by steady, excruciating degrees. His sentences were of the...

If Paul Revere had wielded a laptop instead of a lantern — cut us some slack on the historical improbability here, OK? — he would have understood Wael Ghonim. Ghonim is the man who used social media to move his homeland of Egypt a few long...