Anne Ehrlich is a dedicated guidance counselor steering her high-school charges through the perils of college admission. Thirteen years ago, when she was graduating from Columbia University, her wealthy family---especially her dear grandmother Winnie---persuaded her to give up the love of her life, Ben Cutler, a penniless boy from Queens College. Anne has never married and hasn't seen Ben since---until his nephew turns up in her high school and starts applying to college.
Now Ben is a successful writer, a world traveler, and a soon-to-be married man; and Winnie's health is beginning to fail. All of these changes have Anne beginning to wonder...Can old love be rekindled, or are past mistakes too painful to forget?
With all the wit and perceptiveness of Jane Austen's "Persuasion," "Jane Austen in Scarsdale" is a fresh and romantic new comedy from a novelist with "a knack for making modern life reflect literature in the most engaging manner" "(Library Journal)."

An invigorating exploration of the pleasures and social benefits of conversation Talking Cure is a timely and enticing excursion into the art of good conversation. Paula Marantz Cohen reveals how conversation connects us in ways that social media never can and explains why simply talking to each other freely and without guile may be the cure to what ails our troubled society. Drawing on her lifelong immersion in literature and culture and her decades of experience as a teacher and critic, Cohen argues that we learn to converse in our families and then carry that knowledge into a broader world where we encounter diverse opinions and sensibilities. She discusses the role of food in encouraging conversation, the challenges of writing dialogue in fiction, the pros and cons of Zoom, the relationship of conversation to vaudeville acts, and the educational value of a good college seminar where students learn to talk about ideas. Cohen looks at some of the famous groups of writers and artists in history whose conversation fed their creativity, and details some of the habits that can result in bad conversation. Blending the immediacy of a beautifully crafted memoir with the conviviality of an intimate gathering with friends, Talking Cure makes a persuasive case for the civilizing value of conversation and is essential reading for anyone interested in the chatter that fuels culture.

From the bestselling author of "Jane Austen in Boca, "“another witty tale that combines classic literature with contemporary social comedy.”---"Hartford Courant"
Carla Goodman’s life in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is a little bit stressful these days. Her doctor husband is frazzled, her son’s teachers say he needs Ritalin, and she’s in the throes of planning her daughter’s bat mitzvah. But it’s her sweet widowed mother, Jessie Kaplan, who really has Carla worried, for Jessie has suddenly “remembered” that she was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets in a previous life. Can even the famed Dr. Leonard Samuels, psychiatrist and author of the self-help book, "How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love My Mother-in-Law, "help with a problem like this?
Witty, engaging, and wickedly observant, "Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan" is an unpredictable tale of love, loss, and family rites of passage.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a nice Jewish widower must be in want of a wife.

Jane Austen centered her classic novels around "three or four families in a country village." So does Paula Marantz Cohen in this witty twist on Pride and Prejudice---except this time the "village" is Boca Raton, Florida.
Eligible men are scarce in Boca. When good-hearted meddler Carol Newman learns that the wealthy and personable Norman Grafstein has lost his wife, she resolves to marry him off to her lonely mother-in-law, May. Even May's sharp-tongued friend Flo approves of Norman---although Norman's best friend Stan, a cynical professor, keeps getting under Flo's skin.
Will May and Norman eventually find happiness? Will Flo succumb to the charms of the suavely cosmopolitan Mel Shirmer? Misunderstandings abound until love conquers both pride and prejudice in this perceptive, engaging comedy of manners.


Complications and misunderstandings abound in this romantic and perceptive comedy of manners.

An interdisciplinary investigation into the daughter's role in 19th-century families and their fictional representations.

An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy "Thoughtful, astute, invitingly readable-and uncommonly timely. Especially now that so many younger readers are casting suspicious glances at Shakespeare, Of Human Kindness shows with mind-changing clarity why his work has never been more relevant to our common problems."-Terry Teachout, drama critic, Wall Street Journal "A warm and committed book, firmly rooted in long experience of the classroom."-Emma Smith, Times Literary Supplement While discussing Shakespeare's plays in her university classroom, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that they unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in both herself and her students. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay in his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet,Othello,King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic responses to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.

This provocative study traces Alfred Hitchcock's long directorial career from Victorianism to postmodernism. Paula Cohen considers a sampling of Hitchcock's best films - Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho - as well as some of his more uneven ones - Rope, The Wrong Man, Topaz - and makes connections between his evolution as a filmmaker and trends in the larger society. Drawing on a number of methodologies including feminism, psychoanalysis, and family systems, the author provides an insightful look at the paradox of a Victorian-style gentleman who evolved into one of the leading masters of the modern medium of film. Cohen sees Hitchcock's films as developing, in part, as a masculine response to the domestic, psychological novels that had appealed primarily to women during the Victorian era. His career, she argues, can be seen as an attempt to balance "the two faces of Victorianism": the masculine legacy of law and hierarchy and the feminine legacy of feeling and imagination. Also central to her thesis is the Victorian model of the nuclear family and its permutations, especially the father-daughter dyad. She postulates a fundamental dynamic in Hitchcock's films, what she calls a "daughter's effect," and relates it to the social role of the family as an institution and to Hitchcock's own relationship with his daughter, Patricia, who appeared in three of his films. Cohen argues that Hitchcock's films reflect his Victorian legacy and serve as a map for ideological trends. She charts his development from his British period through his classic Hollywood years into his later phase, tracing a conceptual evolution that corresponds to an evolution in cultural identity - one that builds on a Victorian inheritance and ultimately discards it.

""Suzanne Davis Gets a Life" isn't just seriously entertaining, it's entertainingly serious...I want my romantic comedy heroines to have wit, but I want them to have character too, and be as interested in the world as in themselves. Paula Marantz Cohen has given me all of that."--Margo Jefferson

A "witty commentary on contemporary life, enriched by a funny, flawed, and likable heroine."--"Kirkus"

Suzanne Davis lounges around her tiny New York City apartment in her pajamas, writing press releases for the International Association of Air-Conditioning Engineers, listening to the ticking of her biological clock, and wondering where life is taking her. As her 35th birthday looms, Suzanne embarks on a wrong-headed, but very funny, quest--to find Mr. Right and start the family she hopes will give meaning to her life.

Her quest plunges us into the world of her Upper West Side apartment building, a world of overly invested mothers, fanatical dog-owners, curmudgeonly longtime residents, and young (and not so young) professionals. All are keenly observed by Suzanne, whose witty self-deprecation endears her to us even as it makes us want to shake some sense into her.

Light in its tone but incisive in its social satire, "Suzanne Davis Gets a Life" balances its wit with true concern for its protagonist. We can't help but wish Suzanne success in "getting a life." But can such a search possibly yield the meaning she craves? When her extremely annoying mother arrives on the scene, it appears that her plan has been hijacked. But serious illness opens her to new people and a new perspective. She ends by getting a life--even as she may lose one.

Paula Marantz Cohen's novels include "Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death and the SATs"; "Jane Austen in Boca"; and the recent "What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper." Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University, and is host of the weekly public television program "The Drexel Interview."

Praise for Paula Marantz Cohen

"Cohen's wit is sharp, smart, and satirical, and her characterizations are vividly on target."--"San Francisco Chronicle"

Praise for "Jane Austen in Boca"

"Utterly charming."--"Vanity Fair"

"Page turner of the week."--"People Magazine"

Praise for "Much Ado about Jesse Kaplan"

"A brightly comic book."--"Times Literary Supplement"

"Kept me laughing from beginning to end...a comic tour-de-force."--"The Hudson Review"

Praise for "Jane Austen in Scarsdale"

"Paula Marantz Cohen has done it again Jane Austen in Scarsdale is laugh-out-loud funny, literate, wise--and best of all, a satirical mirror of our times. She has become our own Jane Austen."--Diane Ravitch, author of "The Language Police"

Praise for "What Alice Knew"

"A marvelously rich and intelligent read."--John Banville

Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth is a broad cultural study that connects the rise of film to the rise of America as a cultural center and world power in the twentieth century. Cohen argues that through the medium of film, America was able to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe, assert its cultural independence, and forge a unique form of cultural expression. Silent films drew on elements developed in popular forms of representation like photography, landscape panoramas, and vaudeville performance to create a medium that more accurately represented the American experience.