Percival Everett, one of America’s most imaginative living fiction writers, has put an end to these critical debates by way of rewriting Twain’s novel onto his new book, strategically and programmatically titled James.

Tony Ardizzone is the kind of novelist who, like, say, Margaret Atwood, E. L. Doctorow, John Edgar Wideman, or, for that matter, Italo Calvino, is essentially unable to write a bad book. The reason is simple enough. He is a masterful storyteller.

In the preface to a recent volume of academic essays titled Gramsci In The World, Marxist and formalist literary critic Frederic Jameson argues that, today more than ever, much of Gramsci’s value lies in the ambiguities that his Prison Notebooks, the thirty-three notebooks the Sardinia born communist wrote in prison between 1928 and 1934 under strict surveillance and limited critical sources available to him, necessarily resulted from the unfree physical conditions of the writing.

“A simple racism/anti-racism framework,” Reed Jr. concludes, “isn’t adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn’t up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenging the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”

The two books that I have in front of me are at once similar and quite different. What makes them similar is their Italian American context and the semiotic approach that the author, veteran student of the Italian American experience and Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City, Anthony Julian Tamburri, employs.

Steven Van Zandt's memoir is not a tale of two separate lives. Rather, it is the story of how one can be surprised and rewarded if one manages to stay committed to finding a larger purpose in life than momentary fulfillment.

A recent list of the New York Times’ top fifteen bestsellers includes books by three TV hosts, two political commentators who often appear on TV, a sports journalist, a rock star, an actor, a Hollywood actress, an activist, and a CEO of a major corporation.

The relationship between art and identity stands at the heart of the hundreds of letters that Ellison’s friend and literary executor, critic John F. Callahan and his co-editor Marc C. Conner, included in The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, a collection that spans from the early 1930s, when 20-year-old Ellison hoboed on a train to get to Tuskegee to start following his dream of a music career, until June 1993, some nine months before the now celebrated and revered writer died of pancreatic cancer in his adopted hometown of New York City.