The Angelica Library, in Rome, is a public library located next to the church of Sant’Agostino. Among its numerous shelves of original and fragile manuscripts dating back centuries exists a very important collection that the Catholic Church hid from public view since 1559- the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or List...
Written in 1937 by Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” tells the story of Janie Crawford, a 16-year-old whose grandmother decides to marry her off to a well-respected man in the community. Fellow censored author, Alice Walker, had this to say about the book: “There is no...
“The Fine Line Between Believer and Skeptic” By R. Wolf Baldassarro I have been doing a careful dance as of late on a very thin tightrope. I have been skeptical, highly critical, and utterly blatant lately in calling out bullshit when it comes to ghost hunting and paranormal research...
Published in 1952, East of Eden is often heralded as his most ambitious novel and was originally addressed to Steinbeck’s sons- 6 and 4 at the time- because he wanted to describe Salinas Valley in detail for them through the complex tale of two families. Steinbeck is the author...
Academics, writers, and lawyers have voiced strong opposition to the withdrawal of American scholar Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, following a settlement between the publisher Penguin, a division of Random House, and a complainant group, Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti. Under the settlement, all copies of the...
This is a fairly accurate assessment of our national consciousness and our culture’s attitude toward the events that occur beyond our own borders.
When in the blue hell am I EVER going to use “spargefaction” in a sentence? spargefaction Definitions from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License n. The act of sprinkling. from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English n. The act of sprinkling. from The Century Dictionary and...
I am honoured to have a short story showcased in Punchnel’s Mythic Indy series. The stories attempt to take real, historical, or otherworldly tales of the Indianapolis that you think you know and turn them on their heads. A printed anthology will be published in 2014 collecting all of...
I’ve been asked before why I, being of Italian descent, don’t celebrate Columbus Day. The answer to why the very idea of this day disgusts me is very simple and explained perfectly in the masterful words of Kurt Vonnegut: “As children we were taught to memorize this year ...
Hello and welcome to September. Autumn blessings to all. A recent death went largely unreported. There was no outpouring of grief. No endless video loops in the network news feeds. It went unnoticed because it was a death that had been slow and arduous, occurring over the last 20...