Julia Keller

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...

Chicago will loosen winter's gloomy grip by exerting some powerful literary muscle. In the next three months, award-winning Chicago-based writers such as Don De Grazia, Nami Mun and Stuart Dybek will give readings. And don't miss a local mystery author...

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")...

How'd they do it? That is often thought to be the primary motivation behind our fascination with the life stories of business behemoths: a curiosity about the means – both noble and scurrilous – by which mammoth fortunes are made. "Steve...

In an anecdote that sticks to the memory like an overdone cookie on an undergreased cookie sheet — those 2011 holiday baking mishaps still rankle — an American visiting the Sorbonne is accosted by a French student. "You Americans!" the...

Derring-do and deadly attacks are the elements that make his books bestsellers, but there's nothing Brad Thor likes better than sitting down with a good book. The author, a Chicago native who still lives here, has simple advice for those who aspire to...

"Grief," writes Thomas Lynch, "is the tax we pay on our attachments." It is a beautiful line. It is simple and lovely and true. If you don't feel love, then you don't feel sorrow; to live without a close connection to another person is to avoid all the...

Nothing in life is certain anymore — not even death and taxes, thanks to cryonics and a Republican Congress. Thus I can't give you an absolute, ironclad, airtight guarantee that if you hold "The Magician King" (Viking) at just the right angle at...

Ideas are immortal, but the handy carrying cases in which they're toted around — i.e., books — are not. As proof, I offer my paperback edition of “Mrs. Dalloway” (1925) by Virginia Woolf. Published by Harcourt, Brace & World in...

Two books — one old, one new — changed my mind about flowers. Before reading them, my attitude toward flowers could perhaps best be described as "indifferent." I did not hate them, but I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to include them...

Repeat after me: Sklurp. Skreeech. Ska-runch. There. Feels good, doesn't it? Some words are just plain fun to say. And those are the words, according to Michael Chabon, that belong in any honorable, self-respecting bedtime story for children, the kind...

A friend of mine was fired from her first job as a TV newscaster. Her crime? She was, the news director told her with a straight face, "distractingly voluptuous." He'd considered several remedies — tying back her thick reddish-gold hair,...