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American pop culture is obsessed with child abduction. Watch TV on any given night and it’s hard to avoid stumbling on a drama in which a malevolent stranger snatches a little girl from her backyard or playground or schoolbus stop. (On Monday, when “CSI,” “Medium” and “Criminal Minds” are on, you could watch the scenario unfold thrice in quick succession.) Given the relative rarity of such crimes in real life, why do we fixate on them in fiction?... Read more

Germany’s systematic murder of six million Jews prompted two questions that still nag today, despite reams of literature on the subject. Why didn’t ordinary German citizens protest what they surely knew was going on in their own backyards? And why didn’t more Jews resist their own arrest and deportation?... Read more

It sure is hard living in America today, what with The New York Times, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Endangered Species Act wreaking havoc on old-fashioned American values. Sometimes our contemporary moment is enough to drive a man to assassinate a few liberal judges and career politicians with a slingshot that emits rattlesnake venom through a pair of fang-like needles.... Read more

Say there was a list of fictitious literary locales you’d rather read about than visit. David Huddle’s Glory River would definitely be on it. True, it’s not Mordor or Dante’s Inferno — just a godforsaken Appalachian hamlet that makes the creepiest Southern Gothic burgs of Faulkner and Morrison seem livable by comparison.... Read more

It does Barton poet Leland Kinsey no disservice to say that his latest volume of poetry is as gripping a read as a great novel. The 57-year-old’s sixth book, The Immigrant’s Contract, is actually a series of linked poems narrated by the immigrant of the title — a French-Canadian, never named, who was still a boy when his father moved the family to an unidentified northern Vermont town.... Read more

Once, every suburban wife struggled alone with “the problem that has no name,” as Betty Friedan wrote in her pathbreaking 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured them to Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’”... Read more

In the poem that gives Angela Patten’s new collection its title, the fossilized tongue of St. Anthony sits under glass, a reminder of “the numinous particulars of flesh.” As it takes on a meaning beyond words, the severed tongue is a wry exemplar for these eloquent memories and telling details.... Read more

Bewigged and in breeches, stiff and stern — this is how we often picture our Founding Fathers. Politicians today, especially on the right, tap into this severe image of moral rectitude. They invoke America’s Christian heritage as a sacred touchstone, bequeathed to us by great men who cribbed from the Bible as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.... Read more

What makes a work of art “primal”? What gives it the force of myth?... Read more

In recognition of the Winter Reading issue, this week’s column is devoted to nine Vermont books that we’d not had a chance to read, or review, until now. But before we get to them, congratulations are in order to New Yorker and Seven Days cartoonist-illustrator Harry Bliss: Time magazine has named his book Diary of a Fly, with writer Doreen Cronin, one of the top 10 children’s picture books of the year.

Props to all the Vermonters who published books this year; just getting the words onto the page is a feat. We can relate.... Read more