Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

Close friendships are a heart-warming feature of many of our best-loved works of fiction. From Jane Eyre and Helen Burns' poignant schoolgirl relationship to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn's adventures on the Mississippi, fictional friends have supported, guided, comforted, nursed and at times betrayed the heroes and heroines of our popular and influential plays and novels. This book explores twenty-four literary friendships and, together with character studies and publication history, describes how each key relationship influences character, determines plot, promotes or disguises romance, preserves a reputation, sometimes results in betrayal, or underlines the theme of each literary work. It shows how authors from William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante have by turns celebrated, lamented or transformed friendships throughout the ages, and how some friends - Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson or even Bridget Jones and pals - have taken on creative lives beyond the bounds of their original narrative. Including a broad scope of literature spanning a period of 400 years from writers as diverse as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, John Steinbeck and Alice Walker, this book is the ideal gift for your literature-loving friend.

"Did the artistic aspirations of Ulysses make its salacious parts any less salacious? This work of scrupulous scholarship is an entertaining and important book that traces the fascinating historical details behind the Ulysses trials. It shows that judge Woolsey's famous decision was based on testimony by experts who were calculating, fuzzy, and illogical. Vanderham exposes some of the facile pieties about Art that have prevailed in the academy and the courts ever since. His analysis has important implications for the law, helping us see that such judicial decisions should have a different basis altogether."
--E. D. Hirsch, Jr.Author of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know

When James Joyce's Ulysses began to appear in installments in 1918, it provoked widespread outrage and disgust. The novel violated a long list of taboos by denigrating English royalty, describing masturbation, and mingling the erotic with the excremental--in a style that some early reviewers called literary bolshevism. As a result, U.S. Postal authorities denied several installments of Ulysses access to the mails, initiating a series of suppressions that would result in a thirteen-year ban on Joyce's novel. Obscenity trials spanned the next decade. Using personal interviews and primary sources never before discussed in depth, James Joyce and Censorship closely examines the legal trials of Ulysses from 1920 to 1934.

Paying particular attention to the decision that lifted the ban on Ulysses in 1933, a decision that the ACLU cites to this day in cases involving censorship, Vanderham traces the growth of the fallacy that literature is incapable of influencing individuals. He argues persuasivelythat underneath every esthetic lie ethical, political, philosophical, and religious convictions. The legal and the literary aspects of the Ulysses controversy, Vanderham insists, are virtually inseparable. By analyzing the writing and revising of Ulysses in the context of Joyce's lifelong struggle with the censors, he argues that the censorship of Ulysses affected not only the critical reception of the novel but its very shape.

Rediscover the classics--and share them with readers! The Count of Monte Cristo is a rip-roaring adventure. Pride and Prejudice is an endearing romance. Howard Fast's April Morning is fascinating historical fiction and a moving war story. The list goes on. The trick is to find the right book for the reader. This guide can help. By identifying the genre characteristics of more than 400 classic fiction works, and organizing titles according to these features, this guide helps readers find the type of books they enjoy; and it helps you promote classics to teen (and adult!) readers. Grade 9 through adult. The primary purpose of this book is to provide a readers' advisory tool for those working with teens and preteens in public and school libraries. A secondary purpose is to help educators and librarians promote classic literature to readers of all ages. Teachers in particular will find it a useful complement to college bound and AP reading lists.

"Passionate and revealing love letters from the iconic lesbian novelist . . . Radclyffe Hall is getting a fresh look. . . . Glasgow has chosen these letters well and provides helpful context."
"--Kirkus Review"

"Many assumptions have been made about the degree to which Radclyffe Hall's lesbian classic, "The Well of Loneliness," may be autobiographical. Your John dismisses such notions. This exhaustive collection of letters written between 1934 and 1942 to Evguenia Souline, a White Russian emigre with whom Hall fell deeply in love are detailed, intimate records of Hall's personal life and convictions. . . . the collection is a heart-wrenching record of how politics, money, and geography converged to undermine these women's dreams."
"--Publisher's Weekly"

This landmark book represents the first publication of original writing by Radclyffe Hall, author of "The Well of Loneliness," in over 50 years.

One of the most famous and influential lesbian novelists of the twentieth century, Hall became a cause clbre in 1928, upon the publication of her novel "The Well of Loneliness," when the British government brought action on behalf of the Crown to declare the book obscene. Probably the most widely read lesbian novel ever written, the book has been continuously in print since its first publication and remains to this day an important part of the literary landscape.

Expertly deciphered and edited by Hall scholar and biographer Joanne Glasgow, Your John is a selection of Hall's love letters to Evguenia Souline, a White Russian emigre with whom Hall fell completely and passionately in love in the summer of 1934. Written between this first meeting and the onset of Hall's last illness in 1942, these letters detail Hall's growing obsession, the pain to her life partner Una Troubridge of this betrayal, and the poignant hopelessness of a happy resolution for any of the three women. It was ultimately this relationship, Glasgow argues, which tragically precipitated the decline in Hall's creative work and her health. The letters also provide important new information about her views on lesbianism and take us well beyond the artistic limits she imposed on the characters in "The Well of Loneliness." They shed light on her views on religion, politics, war, and the literary and artistic scene. Illuminating both the nature of her relationships and her views on the current politics of the time, Your John will greatly extend the range of our knowledge about Radclyffe Hall."

This study offers a radical rereading of Conrad's work in the light of contemporary theories of masculinity. Drawing on gay studies, feminism, film theory and literary theory, the author aims to show how Conrad's fiction, even as it reflects certain assumptions of its day about the role of men in society, offers striking insights into the instability of the 'masculine. The book explores the relationship of masculinity with colonialism, modernity, the visual and the body in a wide range of Conrad's major and lesser known fiction.

Mystery and detective novels are popular fictional genres within Western literature. As such, they provide a wealth of information about popular art and culture. When the genre develops within various cultures, it adopts, and proceeds to dominate, native expressions and imagery. American mystery and detective novels appeared in the late nineteenth century. This reference provides a selective guide to the important criticism of American mystery and detective novels and presents general features of the genre and its historical development over the past two centuries. Critical approaches covered in the volume include story as game, images, myth criticism, formalism and structuralism, psychonalysis, Marxism and more. Comparisons with related genres, such as gothic, suspense, gangster, and postmodern novels, illustrate similarities and differences important to the understanding of the unique components of mystery and detective fiction.

The guide is divided into five major sections: a brief history, related genres, criticism, authors, and reference. This organization accounts for the literary history and types of novels stemming from the mystery and detective genre. A chronology provides a helpful overview of the development and transformation of the genre.

Ireland has a rich mythological tradition that stretches back for centuries, and much of this folklore tells tales of the fantastic. During the Irish Renaissance, authors such as William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory resurrected Irish folklore in their literary and dramatic works, thus restoring the popularity of Irish myth and legend. Since the Irish Renaissance, many Irish authors have continued to incorporate Celtic folklore in their novels. This book examines how various conventions from Irish folklore have been subsumed in twelve Irish novels published between 1912 and 1948, including works by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Mervyn Wall, Darrell Figgis, Eimar O'Duffy, and James Stephens. The volume explores how these writers have incorporated in their own works such conventions as heroic obligations, metamorphoses, and the blending of pagan and Christian myths.

In an episodic overview of Joyce's "Ulysses," specific Irish source works are discussed, including the Irish "imram" or sea voyage, and the "bruidhean" adventure, or entrapment episode. The conventions of "geis," metamorphosis, and the Ossianic tradition are studied in "Finnegans Wake," alongside a traditional Irish ballad, "The Annals of the Four Masters," and the "Acallamh na Senorach" In Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds, /i> and "The Third Policeman," an innovative approach to parody is shown. Mervyn Wall operates as a sometimes unwitting commentator on Irish hero tales, via comic irony and inverted motifs, while Darrell Figgis recalls the passing of Celtic heroic traditions in his bitter satire of Saint Patrick and Ois DEGREESD'in's legendary dispute, in "The Return of the Hero." Eimar O'Duffy's satire of modern Ireland mourns the end of Celtic heroic values in a fantasy that is overwhelmingly pessimistic in tone, while James Stephens extols the virtues of the imagination in "The Crock of Gold" and "The Demi-Gods."

This book re-examines the critical debate regarding Hardy's attitude to women: apologist or misogynist? With the help of manuscript evidence and references to Hardy's autobiography, letters, literary notebooks, marginalia, and the letters of his wives, this book combines a biographical approach with a feminist reading. Significant space is devoted to the 'minor' novels, the short stories, and to Hardy's real life literary relations with his contemporary women writers, his protegees and his two 'scribbling' wives, to balance the hitherto exclusive focus on the 'major' novels.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

As one of the only highly praised resources on this important topic, this thoughtfully compiled book examines and suggests picture books and chapter books presenting LGBTQ content to children under the age of 12. Highlighting titles for children from infancy to age 11, Rainbow Family Collections examines over 250 children's picture books, informational books, and chapter books with LGBTQ content from around the world. Each entry in Rainbow Family Collections supplies a synopsis of the title's content, lists awards it has received, cites professional reviews, and provides suggestions for librarians considering acquisition. The book also provides a brief historical overview of LGBTQ children's literature along with the major book awards for this genre, tips on planning welcoming spaces and offering effective library service to this population, and a list of criteria for selecting the best books with this content. Interviews with authors and key individuals in LGBTQ children's book publishing are also featured. A foreword by K.T. Horning of the Cooperative Children's Book Center An extensive bibliography of picture books, easy chapter books, nonfiction books and nonprint materials with LGBTQ content for children ages 12 and under An index of key terms for each title provides easy access to titles representing a specific aspect of LGBTQ culture

Never before has the esoteric significance of the "Novel of the Century" been explained. At last its profound symbolism is made clear in light of the Hermetic tradition, establishing The Lord of the Rings to be the work of an illuminated imagination. Alchemy in Middle-earth traces J.R.R. Tolkien's motifs to unexpected connections with Scotland, the Middle East, and legendary Atlantis, and unveils the ancient wisdom in Tolkien's great work not only with the Alchemy of the past, but also with the living mystical alchemy of Sufism. In the process, the mysterious relationship between the spirituality of Islam and Tolkien's Christianity is revealed, signifying nothing less than the completion of the Grail quest at the end of an age.

This volume contains commentary on the text from Partition 1, Section 2, Member 4, Subsection 1 to the end of the second Partition. It thus concludes Burton's account of the causes, symptoms, and prognosis of melancholy, and his examination of remedies, spiritual and medical. As before, the commentary elucidates Burton's meaning (as well as translating all passages in Latin) and identifies the sources of his many quotations from and references to other authors.

Postcolonial discourse is fast becoming an area of rich academic debate. At the heart of coloniality and postcoloniality is the contested authority of empire and its impact upon previously colonized peoples and their indigenous cultures. This book examines various theories of colonization and decolonization, and how the ideas of a British empire create networks of discourses in contemporary postcolonial cultures. The various essays in this book address the question of empire by exploring such constructs as nation and modernity, third-world feminisms, identity politics, the status and roles of exiles, exilic subjectivities, border intellectuals, and the presence of a postcolonial body in today's classrooms. Topics discussed include African-American literature, the nature of postcolonial texts in first-world contexts, jazz, films, and TV as examples of postcolonial discourse, and the debates surrounding biculturalism and multiculturalism in New Zealand and Australia.

The Victorian novel acquired greater cultural centrality just as the authority of the scriptures and of traditional religious teaching seemed to be declining. Did the novel supplant the Bible? The novelists often adopted or participated in a broadly progressive narrative of social change which can be seen as a secular replacement for the theological narrative of 'salvation history' and the waning authority of biblical narrative. Victorian fiction seems in some ways to enact the process of secularization. But contemporary religious resurgence in various parts of the world and postmodern scepticism about grand narratives have challenged and complicated the conventional view of secularization as an irreversible process, an inevitable 'disenchantment of the world' which is an aspect and function of the grand narrative of modernization. Such developments raise new questions about apparently post-Christian Victorian fiction. In our increasingly secular society novel-reading is now more popular than Bible-reading. Serious novels are often taken more seriously than scripture. Norman Vance looks at how this may have come about as an introduction to four best-selling late-Victorian novelists: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mary Ward and Rider Haggard. Does the novel in their hands take the place of the Bible? Can apparently secular novels still have religious significance? Can they make new imaginative sense of some of the religious and moral themes and experiences to be found in the Bible? Do Eliot and her successors anticipate some of the insights of modern theology and contemporary investigations of religious experience? Do they call in question long-standing rumours of the death of God and the triumph of the secular? Bible and Novel develops a new context for reading later Victorian fiction, using it to illuminate the increasingly perplexed and confusing issue of 'secularization' and recent negotiations of the 'post-secular'.

Half a dozen young men find themselves at the end of their university years facing the awful prospect that they must now support themselves. They decide to found an Ideal Commonwealth, in the Navigator Islands - Samoa (where, by a wonderful coincidence, a decade later, Stevenson himself eventually settled and where he died and is buried). Here - they reason - work and money, dreary offices and dreary jobs, will not be known or needed. But capital is required to start even an Ideal Commonwealth. One of their number knows of "a real, glowing, gaudy, old-high treasure" - gold and jewels in a trunk in a family castle in the Scottish Highlands, theirs for the stealing, and ...Robert Louis Stevenson began writing this comic novel in April or May 1877, when he was twenty-six, and left it unfinished - after 30,000 words, in nine chapters - two years later. It shows a side of him whom most readers have never known existed: a satirical Stevenson making great fun, in a manner worthy of his contemporaries Gilbert and Sullivan, of the events and passions, the personalities and the predicaments, of his day. Previously published only in a French translation, it now takes its rightful place among his memorable early works of fiction. Transcribed, introduced, and annotated by the noted scholar Roger G. Swearingen from Stevenson's unpublished manuscript (now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California), this edition reveals glimpses of the author's developing literary skills and of his complex and often madcap personal temperament. The extensive and illustrated annotations are fascinating in themselves, not least for the references to the contemporary late-Victorian scene.

Ralph Ellison's literary career began in 1937 with the publication of his review of Waters Edward Turpin's "These Low Grounds." Over the next 15 years he published 10 short stories and 37 essays on literary, cultural, and political topics. But when "Invisible Man" was published in 1952, Ellison received immediate acclaim from a wide variety of critics, scholars, and novelists. While his novel emerged as a major work of African American literature, it also engaged the European literary tradition and influenced an entire generation of post-World War II writers. Ellison is now one of the most studied African American writers, and the posthumous publication of his second novel, "Juneteenth, " in 1999 has drawn even more attention to his contribution.

Through previously published reviews and essays, and original material, this book charts the response to Ellison's writings. While the bulk of the volume focuses on "Invisible Man, " the book also includes sections devoted to Ellison's short fiction and nonfiction, as well as posthumous estimates of his work. A chronology highlights the most important events in his life and career, while an introductory essay overviews the broad trends in Ellison scholarship. The volume concludes with a selected bibliography of primary and secondary works.

Introducing a new hermeneutics, this book explores the correlation between the personal faith of F.M. Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and the religious quality of his texts. In offering the first comprehensive analysis of his ego documents, it demonstrates how faith has methodologically to be defined by the inaccessibility of the 'living person'. This thesis, which draws on the work of M.M. Bakhtin, is further developed by critically examining the reception of Dostoevsky by the two main representatives of early dialectical theology, Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen. In the early 1920s, they claimed Dostoevsky as a chief witness to their radical theology of the fully transcendent God. While previously unpublished archive materials demonstrate the theological problems of their static conceptual interpretation, the 'kaleidoscopic' hermeneutics is founded on the awareness that a text offers only a fixed image, whereas living faith is in permanent motion.

This book is a stylistic study of D. H. Lawrence's presentation of narrative viewpoint. The focus is mainly on Lawrence's third novel, Sons and Lovers, occupying a crucial position in his oeuvre and judged by critics to be his first mature piece.While sharing many features typical of nineteenth-century novels, it marks the emergence of a new technique of writing consciousness that functioned as a precursor to the modernist practice of dialogic shifts across viewpoints. Through a detailed linguistic analysis, Sotirova shows that different characters' viewpoints are not simply juxtaposed in the narrative, but linked in a way that creates dialogic resonances between them. The dialogic linking is achieved through the use of devices that have parallel functions in conversational discourse - referring expressions, sentence-initial correctives and repetition. The book uses stylistics to resolve current controversies in narratology and Lawrence criticism.In approaching the study of narrative viewpoint from the angle of discourse, Sotirova arrives at cutting-edge insights into Lawrence's work. This book will be required reading for stylisticians, narratologists, literary linguists and literary studies scholars.

After the publication in 1932 of Angela Thirkell's first Barsetshire novel, her fans eagerly awaited a new book in the series, and they were rewarded annually for the next 27 years. Drawing upon the entire body of Barsetshire novels (set in Trollope's imaginary county whose seat, Barchester, is a cathedral town), Laura Collins shows Angela Thirkell's larger purposes in chronicling the daily lives of the rural English. English Country Life demonstrates Thirkell's conviction that loyalty to family, county, and country is the essential bond that strengthens middle-class culture; her close acquaintance with the English countryside, her high regard for the wit and wisdom of its people, and her firm conviction that the strong family unit is the backbone of the nation, are recurrently illustrated in the Barsetshire series. Collins traces the development of representative county families and their responses to the forces of political and economic decline. The book conveys Thirkell's mastery of detail in recreating life on the county's estates and farms, and in towns and villages, reflecting the cultural changes forced upon all social classes by the two World Wars and their aftermath. Collins shows how Thirkell's own life is reflected in her county chronicles. Perhaps most significantly, Collins believes Thirkell's own experiences as a daughter and as a mother to three sons is reflected throughout the novels, revealing largely in hindsight the touching ironies as well as the comedy of these relations. In the course of these narratives, her sharp sense of human nature is seen at its best when she introduces readers to the many babies, toddlers, and adolescents who grow up in Barsetshire. Makingextensive use of the series, Collins demonstrates convincingly that Thirkell presents an authentic record of upper middle-class English country life. For public libraries and research collections where Angela Thirkell's novels are read, enjoyed, and studied.

Exam Board: AQA, Edexcel, Eduqas & CCEA Level: AS/A-level Subject: Modern Languages First Teaching: September 2016 First Exam: June 2017 Literature analysis made easy. Build your students' confidence in their language abilities and help them develop the skills needed to critique their chosen work: putting it into context, understanding the themes and narrative technique, as well as specialist terminology. Breaking down each scene, character and theme in No et moi (No and Me), this accessible guide will enable your students to understand the historical and social context of the novel and give them the critical and language skills needed to write a successful essay. - Strengthen language skills with relevant grammar, vocab and writing exercises throughout - Aim for top marks by building a bank of textual examples and quotes to enhance exam response - Build confidence with knowledge-check questions at the end of every chapter - Revise effectively with pages of essential vocabulary and key mind maps throughout - Feel prepared for exams with advice on how to write an essay, plus sample essay questions, two levels of model answers and examiner commentary

In this original, interdisciplinary approach to evil in French literature, Damian Catani links literary depictions of evil with cultural events to chart a history of the concept in some of the most important texts in modern literature. Beginning with Balzac and Baudelaire, Catani covers the restoration and the Second Empire before interpreting how Catholic stereotypes of the 'evil feminine' and new scientific theories impacted the work of Lautreamont and Zola. Moving into the twentieth century, evil is then explored in terms of the Self, power, knowledge and politics through readings of Proust, Celine, Sartre and Foucault. By seamlessly bringing together aesthetic, philosophical, historical and ideological concerns to read key French writers from the 18th to the 21st century, this study argues why a broader treatment of literary evils is vital to understanding our contemporary moral and political climate.

Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) each offer a fascinating account of the relation between gender and power in nineteenth-century Britain. While Bronte's first novel focuses on the governess and education, it shares, with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a concern with female disempowerment and the ways in which forms of tyranny can be resisted. Through her inscriptions of the complex intersections of gender, class, sexuality and education, it becomes clear that Anne Bronte articulates and interrogates those issues which still remain crucial to feminist debates at the close of the twentieth-century. Drawing upon recent literary and critical scholarship, Betty Jay sets out to re-evaluate Bronte's novels by arguing that this engagement is as incisive as it is compelling. The need to re-appraise Bronte's work in the light of contemporary critical discourse also extends to include her poetry. To this end, close textual readings of a selection of the poems show the extent to which the simplicity and sentiment conventionally ascribed to the verse deceive the reader, working to conceal Anne Bronte's more intricate and powerful poetics of subjectivity and loss.

This is the first annotated critical edition of works of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), a writer recognized by literary critics, historians, and theologians as one of the most important figures in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Peter McCullough, a leading expert on religious writing in the early modern period, presents fourteen complete sermons and lectures preached by Andrewes across the whole range of his adult career, from Cambridge in the 1580s to the court of James I and VI in the 1620s. Through a radical reassessment of Andrewes's life, influence, and surviving texts, the editor presents Andrewes as his contemporaries saw, heard, and read him, and as scholars are increasingly recognizing him: one of the most subtle, yet radical critics of mainstream Elizabethan Protestantism, and a literary artist of the highest order.
The centuries-old influence of William Laud's authorized edition of Andrewes (1629) is here complicated and contextualized by the full use for the first time of the whole range of Andrewes's works printed before and after his lifetime, as well as manuscript sources. The edition also showcases the aesthetic brilliance of Andrewes's remarkable prose, and suggests new ways for scholars to carry forward the modern literary appreciation of Andrewes famously begun by T. S. Eliot. A full introductory essay sets study of Andrewes on a new footing by placing his works in the context of his life and career, surveying the history of responses to his writings, and summarizing the history of the transmission of his texts. The texts here are edited to high modern critical standards. The exhaustive commentary sets each selection in its historical context, documentsAndrewes's myriad sources, glosses important and unfamiliar words and allusions, and translates his frequent quotations from the ancient Biblical languages.

The world's greatest mystery writers on the world's greatest mystery novels:

Michael Connelly on "The Little Sister ." . .

Kathy Reichs on "The Silence of the Lambs . . ."

Mark Billingham on "The Maltese Falcon . . ."

Ian Rankin on "I Was Dora Suarez . . ."

With so many mystery novels to choose among, and so many new titles appearing each year, where should a reader start? What are the classics of the genre? Which are the hidden gems?

In the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world's leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about the authors and their own work as they do about the books that they love, 119 authors from 20 countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Agatha Christie to Lee Child, from Edgar Allan Poe to P. D. James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Lord Peter Wimsey, "Books to Die For "brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and for those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought . . .

"I want more "

"*** "

"Why does the mystery novel enjoy such enduring appeal? There is no simple answer. It has a distinctive capacity for subtle social commentary, a concern with the disparity between law and justice, and a passion for order, however compromised. Even in the vision of the darkest of mystery writers, it provides us with a glimpse of the world as it might be, a world in which good men and women do not stand idly by and allow the worst aspects of human nature to triumph without opposition. It can touch upon all these facets while still entertaining the reader."

--From the introduction of "Books to Die For"