books tagged “contemporary”

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  • The Anna Papers
    by Ellen Gilchrist
    ISBN 0316313203 (0-316-31320-3)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    This is the story of Anna Hand, a character first introduced in "Drunk with Love", successful author, three-time divorcee, lover of life, who commits suicide when she discovers that she has cancer. Her sister is named co-executor and is at first aghast, then made exultant by her sister's legacy. [via]

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  • Arthur and George
    by Julian Barnes
    ISBN 030726310X (0-307-26310-X)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    A real tour de force from masterful author Julian Barnes is Arthur & George, which was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. Late-Victorian Britain is brought to vivid life in the true story of the intersection of two lives: one an internationally famous author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the other, an obscure country lawyer, George Edalji, son of a Parsi Midlands vicar and a Scottish mother. They start out very differently. Arthur pursues a career in medicine before he discovers that he is really a writer; George, on his way to becoming a lawyer--near-sighted, timid and friendless--is victimized by locals because he is easy to scapegoat--a half-Indian in lily-white Great Wyrley.

    The victimization of George takes the form of nasty letters, the theft of a school key, and finally, the accusation that he has mutilated animals. Meanwhile, Arthur is becoming more and more famous for creating Sherlock Holmes, whom he tries to kill off once and is forced to resurrect because of his fans' outcry. He marries, fathers two children and then, when his wife is invalided by consumption, falls madly in love for the first time with Jean Leckie.

    The novel's style is smoothly revelatory. We slowly come to realize that George is half-Indian, that Arthur is the famous Doyle, that the woman he loves, chastely, is not his wife and, sadly, that George will not prevail over the forces ranged against him.

    When George, desperate to resume his law career after imprisonment, sends Arthur the sad chronicle of his history, Arthur sees immediately that he could not be guilty and sets out to clear his name. This case of George's lifts Arthur from the slough of despond into which he has sunk after his wife, Touie, dies. He is guilt-ridden, constantly wondering if he was attentive enough, if she could possibly have known about Jean. Realizing the immense injustice George has suffered, he is shaken out of lethargy and, in Holmesian fashion, sets out to solve the case.

    Julian Barnes is a gifted writer of enormous accomplishment. This novel is thoroughly engrossing, filled with Barnes's trademark themes of identity and love, longing and loss, and ultimately, an examination of man's inhumanity to man. --Valerie Ryan [via]

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  • Fforde, Katie: Artistic License
    Artistic License
    by Katie Fforde
    ISBN 0312339364 (0-312-33936-4)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Thea, the heroine of Katie Fforde's Artistic Licence, is a disorganised 35-year-old whose life is going nowhere. Or that is how it appears to her student lodgers--whom she unwittingly mothers--and to her older friend Molly, a lady of leisure with a missed vocation as a chief executive. When Thea jets off to Ireland on a whim to stay with the devastatingly good-looking artist Rory, all her friends from her new hometown of Cheltenham are appalled. Equally, when Thea, on seeing Rory's heart-wrenchingly beautiful landscape paintings, decides to set up an art gallery in provincial west of England, her friends cannot believe what they are hearing.

    Katie Fforde makes clear that Thea knows what she's doing, and that her chaotic and messy lifestyle is her own conscious choice. Her determined resistance to the persistent Irish charmer Rory--he's too young, she doesn't have casual affairs--and the apparent ambivalence of Ben, a divorced and know-it-all artistic director of an ad agency, sets up a plot where the embryonic art gallery and Thea's accompanying search for a more satisfying life form centre stage, making any love interest incidental. Olivia Dickinson [via]

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  • Barrel Fever
    by David Sedaris
    ISBN 0316779423 (0-316-77942-3)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    A collection of stories and essays by humorist and NPR commentator David Sedaris based upon his own experiences and the hidden perversity that can be found in Anytown, U.S.A. Here are images and blasphemies that nice people don't dare look at--blatantly exposed and told with the clear, casual voice of intimate knowledge. Sedaris' humor is born of compassion and his tales range from the sharing of cheery Christmas letters featuring infanticide, to experiences of the Gay and Famous (Charlton Heston and Elizabeth Dole, for example), to the lives of siblings named Hope, Faith, Charity and Adolph and to alcoholics and chain smokers you can laugh with. [via]

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  • Being Dead
    by Jim Crace
    ISBN 0312275420 (0-312-27542-0)
    Softcover, Picador USA

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    Penzler Pick, June 2000: It begins with a murder. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. They are reliving their first amorous encounter in the sand dunes when they are set upon by the murderer who beats them to death with a rock and steals their watches, their jewelry, and even their meager lunch. From that moment forward, this remarkably written book by Jim Crace becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward, we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. Eventually we learn about their first meeting, and that this is not the first time tragedy has struck them in this idyllic setting.

    In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus, it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs, birds, and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death. Celice and Joseph would have been delighted with the description: she was a zoologist and he was an oceanographer, and they spent their lives with their eyes to the microscope, observing the phenomena of life and death. Some readers might find this gruesome, but the facts of death are told in such glorious prose that these descriptions in no way detract from the enjoyment of the book.

    After her parents do not return home, their daughter, Syl, must search the morgues and follow up John and Jane Doe reports until she is finally asked to make an identification of the remains in the dunes. We then discover that the reader has had a more intimate relationship with them in death than Syl ever had with them in life. This small gem of a book, not really a mystery in the usual sense, will stay with you long after you finish. --Otto Penzler [via]

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  • Winspear, Jacqueline: Birds of a Feather
    Birds of a Feather
    by Jacqueline Winspear
    ISBN 0143035304 (0-14-303530-4)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • Bookseller of Kabul
    by Asne Seierstad, Ingrid Christophersen
    ISBN 0316159417 (0-316-15941-7)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    With The Bookseller of Kabul, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad has given readers a first-hand look at Afghani life as few outsiders have seen it. Invited to live with Sultan Khan, a bookseller in Kabul, and his family for months, this account of her experience allows the Khans to speak for themselves, giving us a genuinely gripping and moving portrait of a family, and of a country of great cultural riches and extreme contradictions. For more than 20 years, Sultan Khan has defied the authorities--whether Communist or Taliban--to supply books to the people of Kabul. He has been arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned, and has watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. Yet he had persisted in his passion for books, shedding light in one of the world's darkest places. This is the intimate portrait of a man of principle and of his family--two wives, five children, and many relatives sharing a small four-room house in this war ravaged city. But more than that, it is a rare look at contemporary life under Islam, where even after the Taliban's collapse, the women must submit to arranged marriages, polygamous husbands, and crippling limitations on their ability to travel, learn and communicate with others. [via]

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  • The Colour of Magic
    by Terry Pratchett
    ISBN 0312150849 (0-312-15084-9)
    Hardcover, St Martins Pr

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    The Colour of Magic is Terry Pratchett's maiden voyage through the bizarre land of Discworld. His entertaining and witty series has grown to more than 20 books, and this is where it all starts--with the tourist Twoflower and his hapless wizard guide, Rincewind ("All wizards get like that ... it's the quicksilver fumes. Rots their brains. Mushrooms, too."). Pratchett spoofs fantasy clichés--and everything else he can think of--while marshalling a profusion of characters through a madcap adventure. The Colour of Magic is followed by The Light Fantastic. --Blaise Selby [via]

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  • Cusk, Rachel: The Country Life
    The Country Life
    by Rachel Cusk
    ISBN 0312252803 (0-312-25280-3)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    In Rachel Cusk's The Country Life, city mouse Stella abruptly abandons her London career and man for a job in Sussex. Her mission: to care for and transport young Martin, the disabled son of country mice Piers and Pamela Madden, owners of Franchise Farm. Alas, all is not ambrosia in Arcadia. For a start, the Maddens are, well, maddening. The paterfamilias sports "an expression of bright vacancy on his rosy face" whereas his wife evinces a more dramatic sort of derangement: "Pamela, I realized, spoke a language of energetic emergency, in which problems were approached as violently as they were escaped from." To make matters worse, not only does our heroine lack any background in her new field--she doesn't even know how to drive. Long before she's forced behind the wheel, however, Stella is out of her element. Nature, even the very air, seems against her. In one devastating tour de force, she falls asleep in the sun and is hideously burnt (but only on one side of her body!) and then suffers an indoor avian attack.

    Fans of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm will recognize more than a few nods to her classic in Rachel Cusk's hilarious and caustic third novel. For a start, the locals are unfailingly lugubrious, and every dog seems to have it in for our girl from the city. As for her young charge, Martin is either an emotional monster or a savior--though we readers might well opt for the former. The Country Life again and again displays Cusk's eye and ear for surreal comedy and social unpleasantry. Suffice it to say that your idea of a pleasant sojourn--or even a brief walk--in the country will never be the same. --Kerry Fried [via]

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  • The Crimson Petal and the White
    by Michel Faber
    ISBN 0156028778 (0-15-602877-8)
    Softcover, Harcourt

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    Although it's billed as "the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century," The Crimson Petal and the White is anything but Victorian. The story of a well-read London prostitute named Sugar, who spends her free hours composing a violent, pornographic screed against men, Michel Faber's dazzling second novel dares to go where George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and the works of Charles Dickens could not. We learn about the positions and orifices that Sugar and her clients favor, about her lingering skin condition, and about the suspect ingredients of her prophylactic douches. Still, Sugar believes she can make a better life for herself. When she is taken up by a wealthy man, the perfumer William Rackham, her wings are clipped, and she must balance financial security against the obvious servitude of her position. The physical risks and hardships of Sugar's life (and the even harder "honest" life she would have led as a factory worker) contrast--yet not entirely--with the medical mistreatment of her benefactor's wife, Agnes, and beautifully underscore Faber's emphasis on class and sexual politics. In theme and treatment, this is a novel that Virginia Woolf might have written, had she been born 70 years later. The language, however, is Faber's own--brisk and elastic--and, after an awkward opening, the plethora of detail he offers (costume, food, manners, cheap stage performances, the London streets) slides effortlessly into his forward-moving sentences. When Agnes goes mad, for instance, "she sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board." Despite its 800-plus pages, The Crimson Petal and the White turns out to be a quick read, since it is truly impossible to put down. --Regina Marler [via]

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  • Estado De Miedo / State of Fear
    by Michael Crichton
    ISBN 0307376443 (0-307-37644-3)
    Softcover, Random House Espanol

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    Book summary:

    Estado de miedo es una novela de denuncia que ya está causando mucha polémica en EEUU e Inglaterra. Michael Crichton dedicó tres años a la investigación de los datos y cifras que nos facilitan los investigadores científicos sobre el calentamiento global de la tierra, lo que llamamos el efecto invernadero. Cuestiona y descarta muchos de ellos. Según Crichton no hay pruebas claras de calentamiento global. Afirma que hay organizaciones que manipulan datos para probar lo que a ellos les interesa. Además hay personas dispuestas a convertirse en activistas, en ecoterroristas, incluso a provocar catástrofes para publicitar su causa y "confirmar" sus predicciones.
    La novela es un thriller poderoso, convincente, fascinante y muy ágil. La historia es ficción pura pero lo que hay detrás es todo verdadero.
    Para apoyar su tesis incluye al final del libro apéndices y una bibliografía amplísima que demuestran la seriedad y profundidad de la investigación. [via]

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  • Kenyon, Sherrilyn: Fantasy Lover
    Fantasy Lover
    by Sherrilyn Kenyon
    ISBN 0312979975 (0-312-97997-5)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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  • Helprin, Mark: Freddy and Fredericka
    Freddy and Fredericka
    by Mark Helprin
    ISBN 0143037250 (0-14-303725-0)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • Boyle, T. C.: A Friend of the Earth
    A Friend of the Earth
    by T. C. Boyle
    ISBN 0141002050 (0-14-100205-0)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • Hughes, Charlotte: Full Speed
    Full Speed
    by Charlotte Hughes, Janet Evanovich
    ISBN 0312983298 (0-312-98329-8)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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  • Full Tilt
    by Charlotte Hughes, Janet Evanovich
    ISBN 031298328X (0-312-98328-X)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Book summary:

    Mysterious and sexy, Maximillian Holt moves into Jamie Swift's life like a steamroller. She's the owner of a small town newspaper and hes a notorious, brilliant billionaire--what could they possibly have in common? Apparently quite a lot, for besides their mutual affection for Max's airhead sister Deedee and his investment in Jamie's struggling business, they share an explosive sexual chemistry. Unfortunately, Jamie's already engaged to be married. But when someone sprays her office with gunfire, only Max can save her. Now she'll have to rely on him to sort out the tangle of embezzlement, mayhem, and attempted murder that threatens her bucolic world of Beaumont, South Carolina. But if they unravel the mysteries and manage to stay alive, is there any hope for a shared future between a cosmopolitan guy committed to tracking down evil and a small-town girl who just wants a normal life?

    Authors Janet Evanovich and Charlotte Hughes have paired up to create a fast-paced, wacky novel filled with eccentric characters and southern ambiance. In the time-honored tradition of such detective couples as Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man, After the Thin Man) the hero and heroine trade quips and parry sexual innuendos with panache while easily deciphering clues and adroitly coping with danger. Readers will thoroughly enjoy this Jamie Swift/Max Holt adventure, the first in a new series from this author duo. --Lois Faye Dyer [via]

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  • Galatea 2.2
    by Richard Powers
    ISBN 0312423136 (0-312-42313-6)
    Softcover, Picador USA

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    Cognitive neurologist and well-known writer team up to produce a machine that can pass a comprehensive exam in English literature, with predictably unpredictable results. Like The Gold Bug Variations, this is another of Powers' wild, unforgettable novels encompassing science, philosophy, and the frailty of mankind. [via]

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  • The Grapes of Wrath
    by John Steinbeck
    ISBN 0140281622 (0-14-028162-2)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman's stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. First published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book-which takes its title from the first verse: "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck's fictional chronicle of the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s is perhaps the most American of American Classics. The Great Books Foundation Discussion Guide for The Grapes of Wrath is available at www.penguinputnam.com and at www.greatbooks.org. [via]

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  • Gravity's Rainbow
    by Thomas Pynchon
    ISBN 0140283382 (0-14-028338-2)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky.

    Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany.

    That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.

    Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. Gravity's Rainbow uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • The Heart of Darkness
    by Joseph Conrad
    ISBN 0140281630 (0-14-028163-0)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    Adopted at more than 1,000 colleges and universities, Bedford/St. Martin's innovative Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism series has introduced more than a quarter of a million students to literary theory and earned enthusiastic praise nationwide. Along with an authoritative text of a major literary work, each volume presents critical essays, selected or prepared especially for students, that approach the work from several contemporary critical perspectives, such as gender criticism and cultural studies. Each essay is accompanied by an introduction (with bibliography) to the history, principles, and practice of its critical perspective. Every volume also surveys the biographical, historical, and critical contexts of the literary work and concludes with a glossary of critical terms. New editions reprint cultural documents that contextualize the literary works and feature essays that show how critical perspectives can be combined.
    [via]

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  • Heart of Darkness
    by Ross C. Murfin, Joseph Conrad
    ISBN 0312007612 (0-312-00761-2)
    Softcover, Palgrave Macmillan

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    If asked to describe the way in which the study of literature is changing, most of us willing to venture an answer would say that it is becoming more theortical. Without some kind of theoretical underpinning, literary criticism runs the riskof being impressionistic, even illogical [via]

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  • Heart of Darkness and Other Tales
    by Joseph Conrad, Cedric Watts
    ISBN 0192801724 (0-19-280172-4)
    Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    Set in an atmosphere of mystery, this novel tells of Marlow's journey up the Congo River to meet the remarkable Mr Kurtz. The other three tales also appraise the glamour and rapacity of imperial adventure and display insights into human nature and the bases of civilization. [via]

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  • Smith, Ali: Hotel World
    Hotel World
    by Ali Smith
    ISBN 0241141095 (0-241-14109-5)
    Hardcover, Hamish Hamilton

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  • Ackroyd, Peter: The House of Doctor Dee
    The House of Doctor Dee
    by Peter Ackroyd
    ISBN 0241125006 (0-241-12500-6)
    Hardcover, Penguin USA

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  • The Ice Storm
    by Rick Moody
    ISBN 0316706000 (0-316-70600-0)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    A family romance set in the 1970s follows the Hoods as they skid out of control in suburban Connecticut and as Watergate unfolds and troops head home from Vietnam. By the author of Garden State. 22,500 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo. Tour. [via]

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  • Invisible Cities
    by Italo Calvino, William Weaver
    ISBN 0156453800 (0-15-645380-0)
    Softcover, Harcourt

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    "Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take. [via]

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  • Galati, Frank: John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath
    John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath
    by Frank Galati
    ISBN 0140482326 (0-14-048232-6)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • Kenyon, Sherrlyn: Kiss of the Night
    Kiss of the Night
    by Sherrlyn Kenyon
    ISBN 0312992416 (0-312-99241-6)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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  • The Kitchen God's Wife
    by Amy Tan
    ISBN 0143038109 (0-14-303810-9)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the pastincluding the terible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events tha led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.

    [via]

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  • Patchett, Ann: The Magician's Assistant
    The Magician's Assistant
    by Ann Patchett
    ISBN 0156006219 (0-15-600621-9)
    Softcover, Harcourt

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    The Magician's Assistant sustains author Ann Patchett's proven penchant for crafting colorful characters and marrying the ordinary with the fantastic. When Parsifal, Sabine's husband of more than 20 years and the magician of the title, suddenly dies, she begins to discover how she's glimpsed him only through smoke and mirrors. He has managed to keep hidden the existence of a family in Nebraska--his mother, two sisters, and two nephews. Sabine approaches them hungrily, as if they are a bridge to her beloved husband and a key to the mysteries he left behind. [via]

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  • The Magus
    by John Fowles
    ISBN 0316296198 (0-316-29619-8)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    Book summary:

    John Fowless The Magus was a literary landmark of the 1960s. Nicholas Urfe goes to a Greek island to teach at a private school and becomes enmeshed in curious happenings at the home of a mysterious Greek recluse, Maurice Conchis. Are these events, involving attractive young English sisters, just psychological games, or an elaborate joke, or more? Reality shifts as the story unfolds. The Magus reflected the issues of the 1960s perfectly, but even almost half a century after its first publication, it continues to create tension and concern, remaining the page-turner that it was when it was first released. [via]

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  • Many Waters
    by Madeleine L'Engle
    ISBN 0312368577 (0-312-36857-7)
    Softcover, Feiwel & Friends

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    We've all done it. In the frigid depths of winter we've wished we could be magically transported to someplace warm and sunny. But most people don't have genius parents who just happen to be working on a scientific experiment with time travel at the moment of our wish. Sandy and Dennys Murry, the "normal" boys in a family of geniuses, suddenly find themselves trudging through a blazing-hot desert, seeking a far-off oasis for shade. Their desperate wandering brings them face-to-face with history--biblical history. Soon they're feeling right at home with Noah and his family. Even so, the urgent question is, how will Sandy and Dennys get back to their own place and time before the floods--the many waters--come? As they begin to cross the invisible border into adulthood, the twins must confront their ability to resist temptation and embrace integrity.

    In Many Waters, Madeleine L'Engle continues the Murry family saga, which includes A Wrinkle in Time; A Wind in the Door; and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which won the American Book Award. L'Engle's mystical mix of science fiction and fantasy, time and space travel, history, morals, religion, and culture once again urges her many adoring readers to stretch their minds and hearts to understand why the world is the way it is. (Ages 9 and older) --Emilie Coulter [via]

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  • The Mermaid Chair
    by Sue Monk Kidd
    ISBN 0143036696 (0-14-303669-6)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Inside the abbey of a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint, who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. When Jessie is summoned home to the island to cope with her eccentric mother's seemingly inexplicable act of violence, she is living a conventional life with her husband, Hugh, a life "molded to the smallest space possible." Jessie loves Hugh, but once on the island, she finds herself drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk who is soon to take his final vows. Amid a rich community of unforgettable island women and the exotic beauty of marshlands, tidal creeks and majestic egrets, Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, with a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right and the immutable force of home and marriage. Is the power of the mermaid chair only a myth? Or will it alter the course of Jessie's life? What transpires will unlock the roots of her mother's tormented past, but most of all, allow Jessie to make a marriage unto herself. Where does the yearning for soul-mated love come from? When it comes to love, what are the pulls inside a woman between the ordinary and the sublime? The Mermaid Chair is a vividly imagined novel about mermaids and saints, about the passions of the spirit and the ecstasies of the body, brilliantly illuminating the awakening of a woman to her own deepest self. [via]

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  • The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break
    by Steven Sherrill
    ISBN 0312308922 (0-312-30892-2)
    Softcover, Picador USA

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    Five thousand years out of the Labyrinth, the Minotaur finds himself in the American South, living in a trailer park and working as a line cook at a steakhouse. No longer a devourer of human flesh, the Minotaur is a socially inept, lonely creature with very human needs. But over a two-week period, as his life dissolves into chaos, this broken and alienated immortal awakens to the possibility for happiness and to the capacity for love.
    [via]

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  • Vidal, Gore: Myra Breckinridge ; Myron
    Myra Breckinridge ; Myron
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 0141180285 (0-14-118028-5)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • Nine Stories
    by J. D. Salinger
    ISBN 0316767727 (0-316-76772-7)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    In the J.D. Salinger benchmark "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Seymour Glass floats his beach mate Sybil on a raft and tells her about these creatures' tragic flaw. Though they seem normal, if one swims into a hole filled with bananas, it will overeat until it's too fat to escape. Meanwhile, Seymour's wife, Muriel, is back at their Florida hotel, assuring her mother not to worry--Seymour hasn't lost control. Mention of a book he sent her from Germany and several references to his psychiatrist lead the reader to believe that World War II has undone him.

    The war hangs over these wry stories of loss and occasionally unsuppressed rage. Salinger's children are fragile, odd, hypersmart, whereas his grown-ups (even the materially content) seem beaten down by circumstances--some neurasthenic, others (often female) deeply unsympathetic. The greatest piece in this disturbing book may be "The Laughing Man," which starts out as a man's recollection of the pleasures of storytelling and ends with the intersection between adult need and childish innocence. The narrator remembers how, at nine, he and his fellow Comanches would be picked up each afternoon by the Chief--a Staten Island law student paid to keep them busy. At the end of each day, the Chief winds them down with the saga of a hideously deformed, gentle, world-class criminal. With his stalwart companions, which include "a glib timber wolf" and "a lovable dwarf," the Laughing Man regularly crosses the Paris-China border in order to avoid capture by "the internationally famous detective" Marcel Dufarge and his daughter, "an exquisite girl, though something of a transvestite." The masked hero's luck comes to an end on the same day that things go awry between the Chief and his girlfriend, hardly a coincidence. "A few minutes later, when I stepped out of the Chief's bus, the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone's poppy-petal mask. I arrived home with my teeth chattering uncontrollably and was told to go straight to bed." [via]

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  • Not the End of the World
    by Kate Atkinson
    ISBN 0316159379 (0-316-15937-9)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    Arthur is a precocious and inquisitive 8-year-old boy whose mother is a B-list celebrity more concerned with the state of her bank account than with her son's development. With a new baby on the way, Arthur's mother hires--or is she hired by?--an enigmatic young nanny named Missy, who takes Arthur under her wing. In pursuit of art, culture, and finally Arthur's own missing father, Missy introduces him to a world he never knew existed. It's Kate Atkinson's world, and Arthur is just one of its inhabitants--hidden connections link him to an entire constellation of characters who live unpredictably between reality and fantasy. The same wry humor and keen observation that have won Atkinson critical and popular acclaim make her new book crackle with life. Equally inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses and Prada, by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Barbie, NOT THE END OF THE WORLD is further proof of Kate Atkinson's formidable powers as a writer of comedy and substance. [via]

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  • Of Love and Other Demons
    by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman
    ISBN 0140256369 (0-14-025636-9)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)

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    From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera comes an extraordinary reading experience, the story of a doomed love affair between a twelve-year-old girl and a bookish priest, three times her age, who's been sent to oversee her exorcism. [via]

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  • Fielding, Helen: Olivia Joules And The Overactive Imagination
    Olivia Joules And The Overactive Imagination
    by Helen Fielding
    ISBN 0143035363 (0-14-303536-3)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
    by Michael Pollan
    ISBN 0143038583 (0-14-303858-3)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals [Paperback] [via]

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  • The Passion of Artemisia
    by Susan Vreeland
    ISBN 0142001821 (0-14-200182-1)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    Like her bestselling debut, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland's second novel, The Passion of Artemisia, traces a particular painting through time: in this case, the post-Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi's violent masterpiece, "Judith." Although the novel purports to cover the life of the painter, the painting serves as a touchstone, foreshadowing Artemisia's rape by Agostino Tassi, an assistant in her father's painting studio in Rome; the well-documented (and humiliating) trial that followed; the early days of her hastily arranged marriage; and her eventual triumph as the first woman elected to the Accademia dell' Arte in Florence. Although Vreeland makes a bit free with her characters (which she admits in her introduction), attributing some decidedly modern attitudes to people who would not have thought that way at the time, her book is beautifully researched and rich with casual detail of clothing, interiors, and street life. She deftly works history and politics into the background of her canvas, keeping her focus on Artemisia and her family. Beyond the paintings Artemisia left behind, Vreeland's vision may be as close as we can come to understanding the anger and ambition that kept this talented woman at the doors of the Accademia, demanding entrance, in a time when respectable women rarely left their homes. --Regina Marler [via]

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  • The Pilot's Wife
    by Anita Shreve
    ISBN 0316601950 (0-316-60195-0)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    With five novels to her credit, including the acclaimed The Weight of Water, Anita Shreve now offers a skillfully crafted exploration of the long reach of tragedy in The Pilot's Wife. News of Jack Lyons's fatal crash sends his wife into shock and emotional numbness: "Kathryn wished she could manage a coma. Instead, it seemed that quite the opposite had happened: She felt herself to be inside of a private weather system, one in which she was continuously tossed and buffeted by bits of news and information, sometimes chilled by thoughts of what lay immediately ahead, thawed by the kindness of others ... frequently drenched by memories that seemed to have no regard for circumstance or place, and then subjected to the nearly intolerable heat of reporters, photographers and curious on-lookers. It was a weather system with no logic, she had decided, no pattern, no progression, no form." The situation becomes even more dire when the plane's black box is recovered, pinning responsibility for the crash on Jack. In an attempt to clear his name, Kathryn searches for any and all clues to the hours before the flight. Yet each discovery forces her to realize that she didn't know her husband of 16 years at all. Shreve's complex and highly convincing treatment of Kathryn's dilemma, coupled with intriguing minor characters and an expertly paced plot, makes The Pilot's Wife really take off. [via]

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  • Evanovich, Janet: Plum Lovin'
    Plum Lovin'
    by Janet Evanovich
    ISBN 0312306342 (0-312-30634-2)
    Hardcover, St Martins Pr

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  • Red Tent
    by Anita Diamant
    ISBN 0312195516 (0-312-19551-6)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    The red tent is the place where women gathered during their cycles of birthing, menses, and even illness. Like the conversations and mysteries held within this feminine tent, this sweeping piece of fiction offers an insider's look at the daily life of a biblical sorority of mothers and wives and their one and only daughter, Dinah. Told in the voice of Jacob's daughter Dinah (who only received a glimpse of recognition in the Book of Genesis), we are privy to the fascinating feminine characters who bled within the red tent. In a confiding and poetic voice, Dinah whispers stories of her four mothers, Rachel, Leah, Zilpah, and Bilhah--all wives to Jacob, and each one embodying unique feminine traits. As she reveals these sensual and emotionally charged stories we learn of birthing miracles, slaves, artisans, household gods, and sisterhood secrets. Eventually Dinah delves into her own saga of betrayals, grief, and a call to midwifery.

    "Like any sisters who live together and share a husband, my mother and aunties spun a sticky web of loyalties and grudges," Anita Diamant writes in the voice of Dinah. "They traded secrets like bracelets, and these were handed down to me the only surviving girl. They told me things I was too young to hear. They held my face between their hands and made me swear to remember." Remembering women's earthy stories and passionate history is indeed the theme of this magnificent book. In fact, it's been said that The Red Tent is what the Bible might have been had it been written by God's daughters, instead of her sons. --Gail Hudson [via]

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  • Kenyon, Sherrilyn: Seize the Night
    Seize the Night
    by Sherrilyn Kenyon
    ISBN 0312992432 (0-312-99243-2)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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  • Rushdie, Salman: Shame
    Shame
    by Salman Rushdie, Salman Rudhdie
    ISBN 0312270933 (0-312-27093-3)
    Softcover, Picador USA

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  • Small Island
    by Andrea Levy
    ISBN 0312424671 (0-312-42467-1)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Winner of the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction A Picador Original Trade Paperback Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her husband, Bernard, who returns from combat with issues of his own to resolve. Told in these four voices, Small Island is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers---in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life. [via]

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  • The Sunday Philosophy Club
    by Alexander McCall Smith
    ISBN 0316728179 (0-316-72817-9)
    Hardcover, Little, Brown

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    Amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher who uses her training to solve unusual mysteries. She edits the Review of Applied Ethics - addressing such questions as 'Truth telling in sexual relationships' - & she also hosts The Sunday Philosophy Club at her house in Edinburgh. Behind the city's Georgian facades its moral compasses are spinning with greed, dishonesty & murderous intent. Instinct tells Isabel that the young man who tumbled to his death in front of her eyes at a concertl didn't fall. He was pushed. The Sunday Philosophy Club marks new territory - but familiar moral ground - from the author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. With Isabel Dalhousie Alexander Mccall Smith introduces a new & pneumatic female sleuth to tackle murder, mayhem - & the mysteries of life. As her hero WH Auden maintained, classic detective fiction stems from a desire for an uncorrupted Eden which the detective, as an agent of God, can return to us. But then Isabel, being a philosopher, has a thing or two to say about God as well. Visit the author's website can be found at www mccallsmith.com [via]

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  • The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary
    by Simon Winchester
    ISBN 0140271287 (0-14-027128-7)
    Softcover, Penguin

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    Book summary:

    The making of the "Oxford English Dictionary" was a monumental 50 year task requiring thousands of volunteers. One of the keenest volunteers was a W C Minor who astonished everyone by refusing to come to Oxford to receive his congratulations. In the end, James Murray, the "OED's" editor, went to Crowthorne in Berkshire to meet him. What he found was incredible - Minor was a millionaire American civil war surgeon turned lunatic, imprisoned in Broadmoor Asylum for murder and yet who dedicated his entire cell-bound life to work on the English language. [via]

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  • Donovan, Susan: Take a Chance on Me
    Take a Chance on Me
    by Susan Donovan
    ISBN 0312983751 (0-312-98375-1)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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  • Thompson, Vicki Lewis: Talk Nerdy to Me
    Talk Nerdy to Me
    by Vicki Lewis Thompson
    ISBN 0312939078 (0-312-93907-8)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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  • Twelve Sharp
    by Janet Evanovich
    ISBN 031234953X (0-312-34953-X)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Book summary:

    Welcome to Trenton, New Jersey, where bounty hunter Stephanie Plum's life is about to implode in Janet Evanovich's wildest, hottest novel yet!
     
    FIRST A STRANGER APPEARS
    While chasing down the usual cast of miscreants and weirdos, Stephanie discovers that a crazed woman is stalking her.
     
    THEN THE STRANGER REVEALS HER SECRETS
    The woman dresses in black, carries a 9mm Glock, and has a bad attitude and a mysterious connection to dark and dangerous Carlos Manoso &street name, Ranger.
     
    NEXT, SOMEBODY DIES
    The action turns deadly serious, and Stephanie goes from hunting skips to hunting a murderer.
     
    SOON, THE CHASE IS ON
    Ranger needs Stephanie for more reasons than he can say. And now, the two are working together to find a killer, rescue a missing child, and stop a lunatic from raising the body count. When Stephanie Plum and Ranger get too close for comfort, vice cop Joe Morelli (her on-again, off-again boyfriend) steps in. Will the ticking clock stop at the stroke of twelve&or will a stranger in the wind find a way to stop Stephanie Plum&forever? 
    [via]

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  • Joyce, James: Ulysses
    Ulysses
    by James Joyce, Lawrence Rainey
    ISBN 0300108184 (0-300-10818-4)
    Hardcover, Yale Univ Pr

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    Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

    Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

    Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus [via]

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  • Understand Your Bible from Adam to Zion: A Clear Explanation of God's Word
    by Alister E. McGrath
    ISBN 0310240042 (0-310-24004-2)
    Softcover, Zondervan

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    Book summary:

    Written by one of today's leading evangelical scholars, this fascinating, easy-to-read commentary familiarizes you with the key features of each book of the Bible. [via]

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  • Ursula, Under
    by Ingrid Hill
    ISBN 0143035452 (0-14-303545-2)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft"the only sound is an astonished tiny intake of breath from Ursula as she goes down, like a penny into the slot of a bank, disappeared, gone." It is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in the rescue of this little girl, the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. One TV viewer following the action notes that the Wong family lives in a decrepit mobile home and wonders why all this time and money is being "wasted on that half-breed trailer-trash kid."

    In response, the novel takes a breathtaking leap back in time to visit Ursula's most remarkable ancestors: a third-century-B.C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned playmate of a seventeenth-century Swedish queen; Professor Alabaster Wong, a Chautauqua troupe lecturer (on exotic Chinese topics) traveling the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century; her great-great-grandfather Jake Maki, who died at twenty-nine in a Michigan iron mine cave-in; and others whose richness and history are contained in the induplicable DNA of just one personlittle Ursula Wong.

    Ursula's story echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that her very existencelike ourscomes to seem a miracle. Ambitious and accomplished, Ursula, Under is, most of all, wonderfully entertaininga daring saga of culture, history, and heredity.

    [via]

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  • A Wind in the Door
    by Madeleine L'Engle
    ISBN 0312368542 (0-312-36854-2)
    Softcover, Feiwel & Friends

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    "There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden," announces six-year-old Charles Wallace Murry in the opening sentence of The Wind in the Door. His older sister, Meg, doubts it. She figures he's seen something strange, but dragons--a "dollop of dragons," a "drove of dragons," even a "drive of dragons"--seem highly unlikely. As it turns out, Charles Wallace is right about the dragons--though the sea of eyes (merry eyes, wise eyes, ferocious eyes, kitten eyes, dragon eyes, opening and closing) and wings (in constant motion) is actually a benevolent cherubim (of a singularly plural sort) named Proginoskes who has come to help save Charles Wallace from a serious illness.

    In her usual masterful way, Madeleine L'Engle jumps seamlessly from a child's world of liverwurst and cream cheese sandwiches to deeply sinister, cosmic battles between good and evil. Children will revel in the delectably chilling details--including hideous scenes in which a school principal named Mr. Jenkins is impersonated by the Echthroi (the evil forces that tear skies, snuff out light, and darken planets). When it becomes clear that the Echthroi are putting Charles Wallace in danger, the only logical course of action is for Meg and her dear friend Calvin O'Keefe to become small enough to go inside Charles Wallace's body--into one of his mitochondria--to see what's going wrong with his farandolae. In an illuminating flash on the interconnectedness of all things and the relativity of size, we realize that the tiniest problem can have mammoth, even intergalactic ramifications. Can this intrepid group voyage through time and space and muster all their strength of character to save Charles Wallace? It's an exhilarating, enlightening, suspenseful journey that no child should miss.

    The other books of the Time quartet, continuing the adventures of the Murry family, are A Wrinkle in Time; A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which won the American Book Award; and Many Waters. (Ages 9 and older) --Karin Snelson [via]

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  • Winter's Tale
    by Mark Helprin
    ISBN 0156031191 (0-15-603119-1)
    Softcover, Harcourt

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    A bestseller that takes readers on a journey to New York of the Belle Epoque, where Peter Lake attempts to rob a Manhattan mansion only to find the daughter of the house at home. Thus begins the love between the middle-aged Irishman and Beverly Penn, a young girl who is dying. This novel...is a gifted writers love affair with the language (Newsday).
    [via]

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  • The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
    by Roddy Doyle
    ISBN 0140255125 (0-14-025512-5)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Paula Spencer is a thirty-nine-year-old working-class woman struggling to reclaim her dignity after marriage to an abusive husband and a worsening drinking problem. Paula recalls her contented childhood, the audacity she learned as a teenager, the exhilaration of her romance with Charlo, and the marriage to him that left her feeling powerless. Capturing both her vulnerability and her strength, Roddy Doyle gives Paula a voice that is real and unforgettable. [via]

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  • The Wonder Spot
    by Melissa Bank
    ISBN 0143037218 (0-14-303721-8)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    Six years after her amazingly successful debut, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Melissa Bank rewards her fans for their patience with The Wonder Spot, a refreshingly honest interpretation of one young woman's journey into adulthood. As we follow heroine Sophie Applebaum through a comfortable, yet awkward childhood in suburban Pennsylvania to the challenges of finding love and a career in midtown Manhattan, The Wonder Spot is never guilty of the self-indulgent traps set by other members of the Chick Lit genre Bank helped launch.

    We first meet the Applebaum clan on their way to cousin Rebecca's bat mitzvah in Chappaqua, New York, where Sophie ends up sneaking cigarettes in the woods with a handsome eighth grader one year her senior. Yet even this minor rebellion is more charming than anything else; as with most of her future transgressions, Sophie is less the instigator than the innocent witness. Defining moments in Sophie's life are revealed through her relationships: an almost mythical college roommate named Venice; her charismatic yet capricious older brother; her brilliant younger brother; her unpenetrable father; and her hilarious grandmother, who takes it upon herself to save her "Sophila" from "impending spinsterhood." Of course no real journey into young womanhood is complete without a series of committment phobic, potentially deliquent, overly nice men whose appearances seem less about love than about demonstrating our heroine's inability to ever truly be comfortable with herself. As Sophie observes during a seventh grade skating party, "I felt sure that everyone was looking at me and then realized that no one was, and i experienced the distinct shame of each."

    Undeniably clever, occasionally hilarious, and often poignant, The Wonder Spot is captivating enough for readers to forgive Sophie's indecisive, self-destructive tendancies and simply bask in her sincerity. --Gisele Toueg

    Wonder Woman: An Amazon.com Interview with Melissa Bank

    Melissa Bank's bestselling 1999 debut, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, took readers by storm and heralded the wave of Chick Lit to follow in its wake. Bank is back with her new book, The Wonder Spot, a series of interconnected stories chronicling the bittersweet misadventures of middle-child Sophie Applebaum, from adolescence to adulthood. Amazon.com senior editor Brad Thomas Parsons exchanged e-mail with Bank to talk about writer's block, Curtis Sittenfeld's very public take-down in the Sunday Times, and the dreaded "c" word--Chick Lit.

    Read our Amazon.com interview with Melissa Bank


    Wonder Woman: An Amazon.com Interview with Melissa Bank
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    More editions of The Wonder Spot:

  • Amis, Martin: Yellow Dog
    Yellow Dog
    by Martin Amis
    ISBN 0224050613 (0-224-05061-3)
    Hardcover, Jonathan Cape

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