Paretsky, Sara. Windy City Blues (1995)Delacorte When Windy City Blues, a collection of V.I. Warshawski short stories, came out, Sara Paretsky was in the midst of a prolonged and well publicized writing slump. After I read this book, my heart sank. I feared that we might never see another Paretsky book again. I imagined this […]
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Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work Carbondale, Ill., 1978Hardcover, 196 pagesISBN 0-8093-0883-5 Highly Recommended Rosenblatt is one of the proponents of the reader-response theory of literary criticism, a concept that emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to New Criticism, which treated
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Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) rpt. Warner, 1982, 281 pages, $6.99 paperbackISBN 0-446-31078-6 Highly Recommended The story takes place in rural Maycomb, Alabama, between the summer of 1933 and Halloween of 1935. In Part One the young narrator, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, sets the stage for the main action by introducing us
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Grafton, Sue. “O” is for Outlaw (1999) Henry Holt and Company, 318 pages, $26.00 hardcover ISBN 0 8050 5955 5 In an introductory note Grafton explains to the reader that Kinsey Millhone time progresses at a slower pace than real time: “Since the books are sequential, Ms. Millhone is caught up in a
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Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet (1993) St. Martin’s, 199 pages, $17.95 hardcover ISBN 0‑312‑09242‑3 Agatha Raisin arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport with a tan outside and a blush of shame inside. She felt an utter fool as she pushed her load of luggage towards the exit. She had just spent two weeks in the
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Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (1992). St. Martin’s, 201 pages, $17.95 hardcover ISBN 0‑312‑08153‑7 When we first meet Agatha Raisin, she’s 53 years old and about to retire from her public relations job in London to a cottage in the Cotswolds: “The Cotswolds in the Midlands are surely one of the few man‑made
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Death of a Gossip (1985) Warner Books, 179 pages, $6.50 paperback ISBN 0‑446‑60713‑4 Every week during salmon-fishing season a new class arrives at the fishing school in Lochdubh run by John and Heather Cartwright. But town constable Hamish Macbeth has a bad feeling about this particular class…. Macbeth is the lone police officer in Lochdubh,
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Sandford, John. Certain Prey (1999) G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 339 pages, $24.95 hardcover ISBN 0 399 14496 X In his latest Lucas Davenport thriller John Sandford does something different: he focuses on the villain as much as on the hero. And what a villain it is: Clara Rinker, the best hit woman (or hit
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Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls Random House, 1997Hardcover, 267 pagesISBN 0-679-40297-7 Joan Jacobs Brumberg teaches in the fields of history, human development, and women’s studies at Cornell University. In this cultural and historical study, she describes how growing up female has changed over the last century and how, in
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Woods, Stuart. Orchid Beach (1998)HarperCollins, 325 pages, $25.00 hardcover ISBN 0-06-019181-3 Finally, a new book by Stuart Woods that doesn’t feature philandering superhero Stone Barrington. In fact, the protagonist of Woods’s latest novel is a woman, 37-year-old Holly Barker. After 20 years in the army, Barker retires when a male superior whom she and another
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