LaVonne Neff > LIVELY DUST

[One of Chast's unforgettable cartoons] Some 25 years ago my parents and one of their best friends, Gertrude, started showing signs ...

My review of A Spool of Blue Thread was published in the April 29, 2015, issue of The Christian Century .  I especially enjoyed that novel...

News bulletin to Michael Gerson's firstborn son, my firstborn granddaughter, and the maybe 3 million other kids starting college this...

We've survived the Republican National Convention. Next week we will endure the Democratic National Convention. In between, we get Labor...

In June my husband, who gets lots of review copies unbidden, asked me if I wanted to read Mark Shriver's memoir about his father, Sargen...

I bought a car recently, and the dealer just sent me an online survey. It asks a lot of detailed questions and asks for yes-or-no answers. U...

I read Mark Haddon's first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ,  while flying somewhere. Usually plane trips make ...

My 9-month-old grandson is indubitably the cutest, sweetest, smartest, most amazing baby in the whole world. These traits must run in our fa...

The first time she'd heard about the Rapture, she was a freshman in college, taking a class called Intro to World Religions. The phenome...

My daughters still make fun of me for one of my motherly quirks:  in the 1970s, I would not let them have Barbie dolls. To compensate, I gav...