Jeff Turrentine

Mothers are always organizing impromptu “treasure hunts” for their kids; it’s a fun activity that’s sure to bring a smile to a child’s face and a flush of excitement to their cheeks. When Virginia Holman was an 8-year-old girl growing up in Virginia Beach in 1974, her mother greeted her one day after school with […]

Reading Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Lullaby over the course of a week is like coming home, night after night, to a house where someone had a dinner party and never cleaned up afterward. The elements that make any novel worth reading are all in there somewhere–theme, character, plot, humor, pacing and suspense, not to mention a […]

Now that Republicans have recaptured the Senate, what, pray tell, will become of those poor, poor conservative pundits? November 5th was a banner day for GOP lawmakers, understandably anxious to resume implementation of their party’s policy agenda after that frustrating interregnum during which their legislative hands were all but tied. For the men and women […]

There’s a Reynolds Price poem, “The Dream of Food,” that can be read as an elegantly compressed study for his 12th novel, Noble Norfleet. The poem attempts to convey the mysterious, ineffable relationship between a nursing mother and her baby. It takes place at that pivotal moment in prelingual consciousness when the mother is identified […]

Full disclosure: I accepted the assignment of writing about two recently published books, Trust Us, We’re Experts! and Everything You Know Is Wrong, with an arsenal of prejudices fully engaged and awaiting deployment. While by no means a conservative, I’ve always been one of those moderate, equivocating, “establishment” liberals for whom real liberals reserve their […]

The first reviews of Peter Carey’s historical novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, began rolling in almost exactly a year ago. The author’s sweeping literary treatment of the short life of Ned Kelly, Australia’s legendary 19th-century outlaw, was undoubtedly bold: epic in its scope, modernistic in its technique, and unapologetic in its depiction of […]

Good old “image-versus-reality.” Of the various thematic dialectics proffered by our high-school English teachers to encourage critical reading and nuanced writing, surely image-versus-reality was the richest, the scariest, the most modern-seeming. Man-versus-nature? Not so bad in and of itself, but–let’s be honest here–really only useful in writing about camping, or discussing Hemingway or Jack London. […]

In the Middle Ages, bestiaries–volumes of fables about animals both real and fantastic–were used to illustrate the finer points of Christian thought to those unable or unwilling to spend their weekends tackling the Summa Theologica. Lions, griffins, dogs, lambs, peacocks, unicorns and many more creatures, each of them representing identifiable spiritual characteristics, jumped out of […]