Julia Keller

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...

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")...

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...

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) knew his way around two things: rock-hard prose and stone-cold corpses. He was a wizardly writer of mysteries, a man who could ratchet up the menace and dread by steady, excruciating degrees. His sentences were of the...

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...

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...

In every life, a little fall must reign. One slip, one missed opportunity, one hesitation or wrong turn can haunt you forever, casting an intractable shadow over the rest of your days. The words "if only" are never far from anyone's thoughts. But what...

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...

Every writer has two lives: The life that contains elements common to all lives — birth and death and everything in between — and a second life. The second life is another thing entirely. It consists of the world's reaction to the writer's...

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...

Sportswriting is one of those professions that looks easy – all you do is watch a game and sling an opinion, right? – but is actually quite difficult precisely because of that apparent ease. Opinions are a dime a dozen. Being able to...