Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo and her friendship with the eccentric artist Leonora Carrington are the basis of “Alchemy of a Blackbird,” an inventive new historical novel by Cleveland author Claire ...

A novelist and popular history writer, Kelly traces the history of gunpowder from 10th-century China to the late 19th century, when it was supplanted by Alfred Nobel's nitroglycerin. Kelly takes ...