Julia Keller

On page 103 of the April issue of a certain glossy magazine with particularly notorious nomenclature, you will find -- nestled amid the phosphorescent glamor of citrus roasted salmon and the saucy munificence of chintz slipcovers -- an image that seems to...

A sharp-cornered chunk of blue: That's what it looks like. With its brilliant blue cover and its rectangular bulk, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" resembles a hunk of sky deftly extracted from the horizon by a wizard's spade. You would not...

It's not just the noise. It's where the noise comes from. It's the fact that the crazy racket of the "L" trains originates from above. It cascades; it plummets. The Loop, of course, has other sounds too. Its aural tattoo is a mashed-up, motley swirl: the...

When the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, I had John Grisham on my nightstand, Michelle Branch on my portable CD player and a whopping load of guilt on my conscience. The war was under way, and I felt as if I'd been caught, like Jerry Seinfeld in the...

When the night came again it was black night, for the stars could not pierce the dust to get down. . . . In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood. -- John Steinbeck, "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) Surely we have sent...

At dusk the sky here turns a creamy, languid purple, as if a bottle of ink has been tipped on the horizon. Sky is what you notice most in this rural community in southwestern Pennsylvania, sky for miles, sky that arches overhead in an endless cathedral of...

The first sentence sparks a sinuous shiver: A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind's forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air. And thus readers are launched into "Wicked:...

Tribune cultural critic and reporter Julia Keller won the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing Monday for what the judges called a "gripping, meticulously constructed account" of the April 2004 tornado that killed eight people in Utica, Ill. "This is a...

Tupperware may prove instructive here. When you think of how sex and the Midwest are juxtaposed in the public imagination, think of a Tupperware container. To seal the lid, you must run a couple of fingers along the edge, allowing the air inside to...