Emily Dickinson

Lindsey Buckingham's new solo record, "Gift of Screws," is a family album. With a sweetly primal voice, a bucking-bronco/gypsy guitar and sparks of hopeful melancholy, he excavates his soul about being a husband, a father, a member of the human race and a...

Today is Sunday, Oct. 5, the 279th day of 2008. There are 87 days left in the year. Today's Highlight In History In 1947, President Truman delivered the first televised White House address. Speaking on the world food crisis, Truman called on Americans...

"Frankenstein" author Mary Shelley has made a rare Los Angeles appearance. On Sept. 26, some 150-odd years after her demise, she dropped by 826LA's Time Travel Mart in Echo Park -- that Sunset Boulevard purveyor of leg warmers, bottled "robot emotions"...

Defending the Damned By Kevin Davis Atria, $14 A look at the Cook County public defender's murder task force and the attorneys who handle some of the toughest cases. Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America By Felipe Fernandez-Armesto...

A Better Angel Stories Chris Adrian Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 228 pp., $23 WHEN does the tragic cross into the lurid -- and the lurid become simply horrid? Interested parties might take Chris Adrian's collection of short stories, "A Better Angel,"...

Even the simplest snapshot is a complex testament to how the past persists into the present. Then becomes now, remains now. Guillaume Zuili's photographs at Couturier complicate the matter exquisitely. Each is a double exposure, two thens fused into a...

(B) The Foot Fist Way is a semi-hilarious nonformula movie that makes you realize why formulas are born. It's a bit like The Bad News Bears of tae kwon do, except it's really all about the coach (Danny R. McBride), a painfully limited macho-man who...

The classic authors who appear as fictionalized characters in "Wild Nights!" (Ecco, 256 pages, $24.95) aren't the ones most of us met in Intro to American Literature. Edgar Allan Poe copulating with a one-eyed amphibian? Mark Twain pursuing pubescent...

The holy grail of the author's own collector's quest is the 1961 1s 3d Parliamentary Conference stamp, which he recalls as being "the most beautiful small object I had ever seen" as a boy. On this stamp, the head of the queen, which should by rights...

My surname--Goering--recently prompted a reader to write to me about his pain at regularly seeing in the newspaper a name shared by Adolf Hitler's second-in-command, Hermann Goering. After I wrote a response in the Tribune, under the headline "This...

June 8, 2008 Editor's Note: It's a perennial question for the summer months, what to read? Here you'll mind more than 50 titles in fiction andƒononfiction, organized according to the months when they'll be published. Books are listed in alphabetical...

A Summer of Hummingbirds Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Johnson Heade Christopher Benfey The Penguin Press: 304 pp., $25.95 Intellectual cross-pollination is almost...