Casting Extras in The Truman Show

Casting Extras in The Truman Show

The Truman Show Written by Andrew Niccol. Directed by Peter Weir. Paramount, 1998. Reviewed by Titus Techera On its twentieth anniversary, The Truman Show turns out to have been prophetic about what happens to us when we go digital. In the terms of the old world of...
On Dragon Hunting

On Dragon Hunting

James V. Schall, S. J.   Heywood Broun’s very short story, The Fifty-First Dragon, was published in 1921 by Harcourt Brace. It concerns a medieval school for the formation of knights. Matriculating in this school is an apparently inept candidate by the ironic name of...
The Action of Grace

The Action of Grace

This Our Exile: Short Stories by Joshua Hren. Angelico Press, 2017. Hardcover, 131 pages, $22. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill The twelve stories in this slender but powerful volume bring the everyday and the eternal together in compressed, often dreamlike sequences,...
The Humane Vision of Elmore Leonard

The Humane Vision of Elmore Leonard

Westerns: Last Stand at Saber River, Hombre, Valdez is Coming, Forty Lashes Less One, by Elmore Leonard. Edited by Terrence Rafferty. Library of America, 2018. Hardcover, 781 pages, $40. Reviewed by Will Hoyt I first got acquainted with Elmore “Dutch” Leonard when,...
Tomboys and Magic

Tomboys and Magic

The creepy-cozy tales of John Bellairs. Eve Tushnet Children fell in love with the tales of John Bellairs (1938–1991) because they perfectly combined creepy and cozy: the laughing skeleton, curled up by the fire with a mug of cider. In novels like The Curse of the...