The latest in contemporary scholarship details the life and fall of France's most notorious queen, Marie Antoinette.

This is a great collection for the ghost story neophyte or for the old hand at enjoying ghost stories.  The editors present a collection that includes both classic and new tales from established authors in the genre. In bringing these masterful tales back from the dead, Ghost Stories will enlighten and frighten both longtime fans and new readers of the genre.

I’m really a ghost story kind of guy, but the title of this book intrigued me:  Mystery Writers of America Presents VENGEANCE, edited by Lee Child.  I remembered really fun stories about vengeance from my high school teaching days—“The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe sticking out most in my mind.

You know when you pick it up that a book whose writer has won the Nobel Prize in Literature is going to be an important read.  I picked up The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing because it piqued my curiosity. 

One cannot, I think, err when choosing to read one of Joyce Carol Oates’ anthologies of stories.    This volume, Haunted:  Tales of the Grotesque, is as good as any other at introducing the reader to one of the great anthologists and short fiction writers of the last century. Winner of several  O. Henry awards for her short fiction, Oates has also received the Rea Award for Achievement in the Short Story.  Oates clearly knows her way around the shadows and mists on the dark side of the imagination.

If you want a straight-up, studio-jam experience of the legendary Memphis music scene, this DVD will not disappoint you and will leave you wanting more and more and more...

Ah, here is something to be savored and enjoyed!  I make no bones about Flamenco’s being my favorite art form, but biases aside, this is a magnificent, gorgeous, jaw-dropping film by a master director, Carlos Saura.

Who doesn’t love a haunted house story? This fall, as we head towards Halloween, watch the blog for reviews of great spooky reads.

The Haunting of Hill House is one of them, and one of the best examples I know of a “page turner.” I first came to know this story as a young child....

Do you think you want the right to choose when and how it’s your time to die? 

Greetings!  I’m always up for a good scare or haunting, and when this book came sliding through my hands, I set it aside out of a sense of duty because I am the Yankee who has lived here for twenty-five years and still doesn’t know enough about the Bell Witch to sound respectable around a cracker barrel. 

When was the last time you were stopped in your tracks by a pleonasm or a zeugma? You probably wouldn’t know unless you consulted Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase (Berkley, 2013).

Most of us remember laboring through The Odyssey as high school freshmen; we learned at the time that there was another book by Homer—The Iliad—which was about the Trojan War prior to the taking of the City of Troy. If it wasn’t assigned, we didn’t read it, but what an opportunity missed, and how great it is that we can decide to read it as adults! 

Good gossip! Here’s a book chock-full of juicy tidbits about the Presidential families, going all the way back to the Truman administration. You'll get to witness first-hand the details of life in the White House during some of its most tense and historical moments: the assassination of President Kennedy, the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the Nixon disgrace and resignation, the Clinton sex scandal, told by those who saw the events unfold. These stories add another layer of interest to what we learned about these events through the news media.