Paradise Lust

Spin a globe and jab your finger down at random. Chances are good that some wild-eyed theorist has, at some point in the past, placed the "historical" Garden of Eden wherever your digit just landed. In this lively, charming survey of attempts to definitively locate a mythic nexus, Brook Wilensky-Lanford does not stint on madcap details. Eden in Ohio? Readers will be believers after imbibing this wealth of folly.



May 24: Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Works was published on this day in 1951. Included in this omnibus edition were most of the pieces upon which her reputation now stands, putting her in a rank…

Do you recall the tagline from the very first Superman movie? "You'll believe a man can fly!" Well, I'm tempted to craft such a hyperbolic assertion for China Miéville's…

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