Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather, the 17th Century Puritan minister and witch-fighter extraordinaire, wrote that "Witchcraft seems to be the skill of applying the Plastic Spirit of the World unto some unlawful purposes, by means of a Confederacy with Evil Spirits." He...

True Crime An American Anthology Edited by Harold Schechter Library of America: 816 pp., $40 THE TITLE of this massive anthology, "True Crime," is misleading. Within these pages the reader will find nothing of the rich American literature of the...

No serious writer in America works with a lighter touch than Robert Olen Butler. That sure hand, guided by a potent creative intelligence, saves books like "Tabloid Dreams" (1996), inspired by supermarket weekly headlines, from mere whimsy. Butler...

A dozen heads bow as Derek Baars prays that God will bless their day at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. ``Holy Father, as we gather for prayer, we thank thee so much for the opportunity to come to thee,'' prays Baars, a blind student from...

A roasted goose rests on the table. A Christmas tree, adorned with candles and strings of cranberries, takes up a full corner of the room. Stockings hang from the hearth, stuffed with presents. And perhaps a Tiny Tim-esque boy offers the season's toast:...

The image of Santa Claus is one of the most familiar in the world. For as long as anyone can remember, the jolly, elderly, fat, bearded man in a red suit trimmed with fur has been the symbol of the nation's most popular holiday. But like many things, the...

The Grinch would have come up empty- handed in Colonial Connecticut. There would have been no presents under the tree, let alone a tree to steal. Christmas was viewed by the Puritans of New England as a corrupt religious, if not a pagan, ritual and was...

Friday November 22, 1996      Robert Byington's "Shameless," also known as "Sin Verguenza," is a rightly disturbing and venturesome first film of more interest for what it portends for Byington than for what it accomplishes--although that in itself is...

Gore Vidal the novelist's best character is Gore Vidal the essayist. Beside him even Myra Breckenridge seems a pale creation, and this great fat book, chronicling 40 years of the essayist's adventures, is like a lively picaresque novel in reverse. Its...