How Carl Barks made Uncle Scrooge McDuck the center of a magical, web-footed world.

Five works of fantastika you might have missed this year.

Their father was universally beloved, but growing up Dickens led, more often than not, to hard times.

A short list of books that are equal parts entertainment and provocation.

Charles Dickens's beloved characters often harbored terrible secrets.  Their creator was no different.

A Sinatra impersonator enmeshed in a Silicon Valley murder.

These novels find romance even in the direst circumstances.

The network of spies and secret police that kept Good Queen Bess in power.

Seeking to define the New Space Opera through the work of one of its seminal practioners.

Revisiting Wallace Stegner's bittersweet tale of two couples whose lives are braided together.

After infiltrating a ruthless criminal's gang, a cop is murdered, launching an urgent investigation.

The author of Atonement launches a tale of narrative deception from the spy games of a dying Cold War.

The unsung deeds of a hero of the Royal Navy.

A story of the rivalry between the two greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance -- and the vanished masterpieces their competition produced.

Love stories that offer respites from trying times.