Everything seems wrong in Ginny Polk’s life, from her bitter relationship with her mother to her inappropriate romance with Roscoe Simms, warden of Greenmount State Penitentiary in 1950s Louisiana. Ginny even bears scars from her childhood, when she witnessed the electrocution of the man convicted of killing her father. It’s to Ginny’s credit that she attempts to beautify her ugly environment, by cooking special last meals for the condemned prisoners.

Even those meals sound like cruel and...

Thomas Schlesser must have known from the start that he needed a special framework for this novel. Stripped of its premise, Mona’s Eyes is an art history lesson, and a very good one.

Mona, a ten-year-old French girl, suffers a temporary vision loss that may recur at any time. Her grandfather, Henry Vuillemin, resolves to take her on weekly museum expeditions so that if she does go blind, she will have lasting memories of great artworks.

If you know as little about art as I do, you’ll find the...

Are some people too smart for their own good? Or are they just good at rationalizing? Author Don DeLillo introduces a community of philosophical buffoons in his hilarious satire, White Noise.

Jack Gladney is chairman of the Department of Hitler Studies at his college. His colleagues are pseudointellectuals with crackpot theories. His friend Murray says that people can be divided into two categories: killers and “diers”. Killers, he explains, stow up credit like bank interest because their...