Uptown Literati

When the Clutter family was murdered in Holcomb, Kansas on November 15, 1959 with no trace of a suspect, chief investigator Alvin Dewey declared that in order to crack the case, his team had to “know the Clutters better than they ever knew themselves.”

Truman Capote adopted this goal for himself when he began to write [...]

I picked up Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on a recommendation from my grandmother, a witty and well-read lady herself. “It’s an epistolary novel, so it’s written entirely in letter form,” she explained. “And it really is the loveliest novel I’ve read in a while. [...]

Eating out should be a joyous experience, in theory. However, the question alone of what to eat or which appetite to satisfy—the sweet or the tangy—can be daunting, even agonizing. Then of course there is the decision of where to eat: someplace fancy or someplace ordinary? Recommendations, especially those coming from someone as highly [...]

It’s been 36 years since Erica Jong’s groundbreaking Fear of Flying flew off the shelves and into the limelight as a book that would change not just literature, but the lives of women.

Reading it now, it’s easy to appreciate it as a great read, but harder to see it in its original, [...]

Voltaire’s short novel, Candide synthesizes the main conflicts that brewed and erupted during the Enlightenment of the 18th Century: reason vs. rationalization.
Born François Marie Arouet in 1694, Voltaire’s formative years were spent in Paris, where he contributed to what would become the city’s long-standing reputation for protesting government and church doctrine. Francois Marie Arouet often [...]

Thankfully, in the middle of our feeling disturbed or bothered or anxious or stagnant there is a silver lining to every situation that will bring all things into clarity. Recently, when my mind felt like it was being scattered to the four winds, I found the silver lining in one of the “happiest places on [...]