Thane Tierney
Content by Thane Tierney
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When the legendary newsman Edward R.
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The two most famous social science experiments of the post-WWII era—designed, incidentally, by a pair of former high-school buddies—ended in disaster.
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In You, novelist Austin Grossman doesn’t just blur the lines between virtual and authentic reality; he slices them into bits, tosses them in the air and lets them land like confetti on the page.
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Somewhere in America—in fact, lots of places in America—people are getting married every day with no problem larger than, say, the flower arrangements being the wrong shade of
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"History," according to Junior Ray Loveblood, "is an amazing thing. Once I got started, it just more or less begun to write itself." Well, not exactly.
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Suppose, just for a moment, that you found a postcard under your front door with a photograph of a painting currently on display at a local museum.
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Who will be the next American Idol? Who will The Donald pick to be his apprentice? Who wants to be a millionaire? You do. I do.
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English journalist Sarfraz Manzoor peeks behind the curry curtain in modern U.K. Pakistani culture in his memoir, Greetings from Bury Park.
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There comes a point in every examined life that one can’t avoid looking back at a whole series of choices and coming to grips with what RL, the late-middle-aged protagonist of Kevin Canty&r
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Noel Coward once said that only "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun." Journalist Jeroen van Bergeijk, whose chronicle of an "auto-misadventure across the Sahara,"
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<b>East meets West in Sijie's new novel</b> The eighth-century poet Li Po could well have been describing the plot of Dai Sijie's latest novel, <b>Mr.
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There comes a point in life when your bucket list has narrowed down to a single item, and that’s just where John and Ella Robina find themselves in The Leisure Seeker.
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Leave it to the great-great-grandson of Nikolai Gogol to concoct a novel at once riotous and melancholic, intimate and expansive, as it tracks the parallel arcs of personal and international even
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Wouldn't it be great to get into your 1966 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon, load up the tank with 18&andcent;-per-gallon gas from your local Cities Service, Richfield, Enco, Flying A or Humble
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Conman and condemned prisoner Moist von Lipwig cheated the noose once, but it's not the sort of thing you really want to get good at; while practice makes perfect, mistakes make cadavers.
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Even in the 21st century, Renaissance-era political mastermind Machiavelli’s advice has its applications—something that modern-day Israeli spy Gabriel Allon has ignored at his peril.
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According to a recent Harris Poll, 90 percent of Americans believe in God to varying degrees, and 58 percent are absolutely certain of God's existence.
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Scriptwriting guru Syd Field is said to have honed the three-act structure down to a few simple sentences: “Get your protagonist up a tree. Throw rocks at him.
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Gilbert Selwyn is the sort of friend you'd love to have . . . tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail.
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<B>It's not only rock n' roll</B> How often have we turned to popular song to define love, to find out that love is like oxygen, or love is the drug, or a battlefield, or blue, or stra
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<b>Lights, camera, action fill Moody's latest</b> The story, it's incredible, it's like this gigantic story, spanning a thousand years.
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Burned-out, soon-to-be-divorced, self-doubting, alcoholic, nearly impoverished, overweight middle-aged male poet seeks tattooed, wise-beyond-her-years, extensively pierced, rail-thin, self-destructiv
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In rugby, if the game is unresolved at the end of regulation play, it concludes in sudden death overtime.
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Though Chris Abani is a foreigner by birth, he has artfully exposed Los Angeles' heart of darkness in The Virgin of Flames, the follow-up to his acclaimed debut, Graceland, which was a
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Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse once observed that, We have to stumble through so much dirt before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Homesickness is our only guide.
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Scots poet Robert Burns, a keen observer of human behavior, once wrote, O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!
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Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder, and she's being examined by a police psychiatrist to discover whether she is fit for trial or fit for a straitjacket.
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Let us celebrate, just for a moment, those evil geniuses among us whose perpetually foiled schemes have added such a piquant spice to life on this third stone from a nondescript yellow sun.
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What if your dreams came true? Not the ones where you win the lottery or dance in the moonlight with Ralph Fiennes, but ones where you see a guy is going to get hit by a bus . . . and he does.
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It happens about every 10 words the ums, uhs, you knows the verbal placeholders we use while our minds race ahead of our tongues, the verbal gaffes like substituting interweb for Internet or repl
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It’s a tempting, if somewhat hazardous, pursuit to try to pull back the authorial curtain to see if you can divine the actual novelist standing in the flesh of one of his characters.
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As the actor Carleton Young declared in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That’s exactly what happened in the April 1913
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No man is an island, says poet John Donne. Man hands on misery to man, says poet Phillip Larkin.
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Phil Fitch has reached a crossroads in his post-'Nam existence: he can play out a string of low-wage, brain-numbing jobs, or take a crack at two hundred large and retire in comfort.
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Phil Fitch has reached a crossroads in his post-'Nam existence: he can play out a string of low-wage, brain-numbing jobs, or take a crack at two hundred large and retire in comfort.
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He once fired a man on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. He had his assistant ghostwrite an op-ed piece on the death of literacy in America.
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In the follow-up to his New York Times bestseller Obedience, author Will Lavender returns to a campus setting for a novel that pulls the reader into a world where words like “text,” “meaning” and “narrative” contort into funhouse-mirror grotesques. And the consequence of misplaced trust, whether in an individual or in one’s own intellect, could be a matter of life and death.
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Some people travel to Mecca. Others climb Mount Fuji. Some join the sunglassed throng at the gates of Graceland.
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Like Rashomon on Red Bull no, make that steroids ex-lawyer Rudolph Delson's debut novel, Maynard &andamp; Jennica, scrutinizes a New York City love affair from nearly three dozen
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Philip Larkin, in a rather scandalous poem from the '70s, alleged that parents "fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you." So it is with David Burkett, the protagonist in Ji
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Do you ever wonder if we are living in the last great age of freedom?
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The author of the critically lauded Set This House in Order, Fool on the Hill and Bad Monkeys has constructed a funhouse-mirror mash-up where H.G. Wells and Graham Greene collide with The Arabian Nights and The Matrix.
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Remember what happened when those Danish cartoonists drew caricatures of the Islamic prophet?
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Many years ago, a friend who was part of the team that helped construct the Internet gave me the best single piece of advice I have ever received about e-mail: Don't ever write anything in an e-mail
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As Kermit the Frog taught us so many years ago, it's not easy being green.
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From across the pond and across the centuries, the words of Stratford-upon-Avon's most famous resident have never rung with such screwball truthiness as in Jess Winfield's My Name Is Will: A Novel
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Not since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich has an author captured the crushing sense of foreboding that hung over Uncle Joe's Soviet state with the clear-eye
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In his third book, Joey Goebel, author of Torture the Artist and The Anomalies, holds a funhouse mirror up to our national family's biennial reunion (aka congressional elections), frame
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