Julia Keller

If you watch "The Sports Reporters" each Sunday on ESPN, as I do religiously, you know how Mike Lupica looks just before he's about to deliver a contrarian opinion about some topical issue in the sports world. He leans forward in his chair. His forehead...

In the introduction to his impishly profound new collection of poems, Thomas Lynch recalls that when he finished writing the first handful, he "field-tested them at Joe's Star Lounge on North Main Street in Ann Arbor." The event is "a kind of communion, I...

On the fifth floor of the Chicago Tribune Tower is a square windowless room accessed by a single door. This room is called, with a regrettable lack of imagination, the Book Room. It will not surprise you to learn that it is filled with books. Day...

A tweak. A twinge. A minor ache in the knee. A mild stitch in the side. For most of us, the process of aging arrives in what the showbiz folks call a soft open: You don't feel it in a grand thunderclap, but in a gradual series of small incidents. When...

Let the fireworks begin. When talk turns to naming the Great American Novel — the upper-case designation is required by custom, if not by law — tempers tend to flare. Each time I approach the subject in a column, and display the shameless...

Fiction "The Lost Memory of Skin" (Ecco) by Russell Banks. Coming Tuesday. Banks, one of our finest and most adventurous novelists, is not afraid to tackle big, tough topics that persistently bedevil the human species, and with his 17th book, he has...

Hero. Ishmael. Ramsey. Sophie. Bonnie. Those are, in order of appearance, the names of thedogs — all mutts — with whom I have shared my life from the time I was 4 years old. And if you listen to Wade Rouse — which you most assuredly...

You don't know a city — really know it, that is, as opposed to just learning the bus routes and having a favorite bar — until you've walked a mile in its fictions. Until you see the way great fiction writers deal with the city. Among the best...

Some people dream of smacking the game-winning grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, or curing cancer, or being elected president, or running into a burning building to rescue babies and/or kittens. And some people dream of sitting down at a desk to...

The second-greatest mystery ever to come out of Sweden – the first being "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and its novelistic siblings by the late Stieg Larsson – is the annual speculation about who will receive the Nobel Prize in literature....

If you can imagine a bricklayer who's had it up to here with bricks, or a pastry chef who's frankly a little ambivalent about the whole flour and sugar deal, then you get Daniel Clowes. He works with words and pictures, but he's pretty suspicious of...

History is real, but sometimes reality doesn't tell the whole story. That's why we have the historical novel — a genre that, at its best, combines the cold scrupulousness of fact and the hot drama of human ambitions and emotions. To understand...