Red Weather Review

I came half-awake, dead and dreaming.

-Walter Moseley, Little Green: An Easy Rawlins Mystery

From the outset Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had a great ambition for Paris.

-Stephane Kirkland, Paris Reborn: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City

Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan is a tough mammy jammy.

-T.J. English, Whitey’s Payback: And Other True Stories of Gangsterism, Murder, Corruption, and Revenge

The old library at the Loomis School, off the grand entrance to Founders Hall, was a cramped and uninviting place, with giant tables, cork floors, and books shoehorned into caged stacks in a back room.

-David Margolick, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

Dr. Auctor always looked like a plausible surgeon, if only because he was so handsome.

-Louis B. Jones, Innocence: A Novel

Even though I do know the important question is not why this happened to me but what I’m going to do now; and even though I was fifty-five and the attacker was a serial rapist in a small town, raping gringo women between fifty and sixty; and even though I, along with the entire town, felt like evil had come for a visit and it was not personal; and even though this little round-faced pervert with a big-billed baseball cap woke me in the middle of the night in the middle of a deep sleep in my own bed with a knife inches from my face, I was absolutely shocked that he chose me.

Beverly Donofrio, Astonished: A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace

In something like thirty years at The Nation, first as the magazine’s editor, then as owner and publishers, only once did the staff march on my office with a petition demanding that we not publish something.

-Victor S. Navasky,The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power

Nearly every weekday morning for a year and a half, I got up at 5:30, brushed my teeth, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to write about how some of the greatest minds of the past four hundred years approached this exact same task–that is, how they made the time each day to do their best work, how they organized their schedules in order to be creative and productive.

-Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work