Julia Keller

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...

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...

When your 5-year-old daughter wants to play "I Spy" and says, "I spy with my little eye ..." and decides that her mystery object starts with a "B," and then she points to a bar — one of the iron bars on the door of a jail cell — you know you'...

The late John Updike once opined that we are all "trapped in solitary confinement inside our own skins." We can't ever really know what someone else is feeling, no matter how hard we try or how desperately she or he wants us to. Our unique souls are...

A good anthology is like a dartboard in a crowded bar on a Saturday night. Everybody lines up to take their best shot. Everybody wants the chance to squint, aim and let fly. The more august and monumental and definitive-seeming the anthology —...

Modern psychiatry has robbed the world of its monsters. We know so much more about the brain, about the complex interaction of chemicals that determines an individual's fate, than ever before. Thus to look upon a heinous act and attribute it to...

If you want to make Stephen Sondheim mad enough to swat you over the head with a rolled-up musical score, try this: Call him a poet. As Sondheim insists in interviews, essays and in the introduction to his book "Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics...

It's time for the travel two-step: First, deciding where in the world you'd like to go for your summer vacation. Second, finding the perfect travel guide to accompany you. I've been known to stand in a bookstore aisle for long agonizing stretches, reading...

Henry James once opined that the two most beautiful words in the English language are "summer afternoon." I would like to edit James — alas, who wouldn't? — and bestow the most felicitous phrase award upon the words "summer reading." They...

If Paul Revere had wielded a laptop instead of a lantern — cut us some slack on the historical improbability here, OK? — he would have understood Wael Ghonim. Ghonim is the man who used social media to move his homeland of Egypt a few long...