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...

Three's (good) company Last week we congratulated Chicago-area residents Christine Sneed and Rebecca Skloot because their books (in the new fiction and science categories, respectively) were finalists for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Winners...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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")...