Flannery O'Connor

Earlier this year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a 100-book required reading list for his compatriots, it provoked anxiety, rekindling memories of Soviet-era censorship. The furor underscored an important point: that literature plays a...

Harry Crews, a rough-hewn Southerner who drew a keen following with novels that describe a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of grotesques — characters who are tossed into rattlesnake pits, walk on their hands, croon lullabies to a skull and literally...

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")...

Tuesday will mark the Iowa caucuses, the first voting that counts in the presidential race. During this quadrennial ritual, politicians conduct "retail politics," whether or not the people buy it. Here are 10 facts that can withstand the upcoming...

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")...

Long before Jon Stewart dubbed it "Mess-O-Potamia," Iraq was the "cradle of civilization." Blessed by the Tigris and Euphrates, it was a fertile area in an inhospitable region that, for millenia, was the center of the Sumerian and Babylonian...

You might know and love Flannery O'Connor as the legendary author of short fiction. (She's this humble correspondent's favorite short story writer -- mainly because could take the mundane motions of southern life and skew them into something dark and...

On the very first page of "The Kid," we learn Precious has died, leaving behind an orphan 9-year-old son, Abdul. Just like that, Sapphire, whose novel "Push" was adapted into one of 2009's most acclaimed films, "Precious," moves aside her troubled and...

Volt: Stories By Alan Heathcock Graywolf. $15.00,  208 pages Eight stories, by native Chicagoan Alan Heathcock, who lives and works in Idaho, where he seems to have found in that mostly rural state great inspiration in the pathetic and maniacal denizens...

Hisaye Yamamoto, one of the first Asian American writers to earn literary distinction after World War II with highly polished short stories that illuminated a world circumscribed by culture and brutal strokes of history, has died. She was 89. Yamamoto...

HOW IT GOT ITS NAME: Named Reading in 1729 for John Read, the first white man to settle in the area, and also influenced by Reading in Berkshire, England. Changed to Redding when it was incorporated, most likely to match the pronunciation of the English...

"Letters of James Agee to Father Flye" (1962). The poet, novelist and film critic James Agee was fatherless from a young age and filled the gap with a kindly Catholic priest, to whom Agee wrote frequently and candidly. "The Letters of Virginia Woolf"...