“This morning, as she went about humming God moves in a mysterious way, Belinda wondered what to do first,” the English novelist Barbara Pym writes of a character. Her 1950 novel, “Some Tame Gazelle,” ...

In Wisconsin, the weather is drab and gray most days this time of year. We get up while it is still dark outside, and by the time we get home to have dinner, the sun, if it appeared at all during the ...