A study in critical readership, this wide-ranging collection of essays challenges accepted theories on everything from classics such as Charlotte Bronte's Villette to more contemporary works like Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man. Explored are ideas of sexual subversion and queer politics. Literature's sacred cows are reevaluated, and new ways to explore both reading and writing are offered.

In these 28 stories, by turns funny, touching and scary, Welsh women authors explore the turning points - the key decisions, the mistakes, the victories or perhaps the roads not taken - that can change a woman's life forever.

In this ravishing tale of sexual and textual obsession, the young unnamed narrator sets forth from Cambridge on a quest. He is to rescue the subject of his doctoral research, Paul Michel, the brilliant but mad writer, from incarceration in a mental institution in France. What ensues is a drama of terrible intimacy and tenderness played out one hot and humid summer in Paris and in the south of France. "Hallucinating Foucault" is a literary thriller that explores with consummate mastery the passionate relationship between reader and writer, between the factual and the fictional, between sanity and madness. In blurring these boundaries, Patricia Duncker has written a novel of astonishing power and beauty.

This is a collection of ten women's accounts of their experiences of cancer. None of the accounts are "conventional" cancer stories of heroic defiance in the face of adversity.;Debbie Dickinson imagines herself as music incarnate, as instruments and voices, different selves, combine and conflict. Jackie Stacey confronts the cancer narrative head on - likening it to Hollywood structures, with heroes, villains and closures - and looks for a different way to convey her own story. Patricia Duncker examines the anger so often excized from the heroic stories, and looks at the reaction of others to her and her disease. Felly Nkweto Simmonds finds cancer a tempering experience, bringing strength, but also aloneness. Poet Marilyn Hacker uses a sonnet sequence to convey the emotions her "Cancer Winter" aroused. Carole Colbourn chronicles the painful dissolution and renewal of her marriage.

A study in critical readership, this wide-ranging collection of essays challenges accepted theories on everything from classics such as Charlotte Bronte's Villette to more contemporary works like Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man. Explored are ideas of sexual subversion and queer politics. Literature's sacred cows are reevaluated, and new ways to explore both reading and writing are offered.

Berlin, September 1872. The Duncker brothers, Max and Wolfgang, own a thriving publishing business in the city. Clever, irresponsible Max is as fond of gambling and brothels as the older, wiser, Wolfgang is of making a profit. When Max's bad habits get out of hand, Wolfgang sends him to the Spa town of Homburg, to dance attendance upon a celebrity author - the enigmatic Sibyl, also known as George Eliot. As enthralling and intelligent as her books, she soon has Max bewitched. Yet Wolfgang has an ulterior motive: for his brother to consider Sophie von Hahn, daughter of a wealthy family friend, as a potential wife. At first, Max is lured by Sophie's beauty and his affectionate memories of their shared childhood. But Sophie proves to be nothing like the vision of angelic domesticity Max was expecting. Mischievous, wilful and daring, Sophie gambles recklessly and rides horses like a man. Both women have Max in thrall - one with her youth and passion, the other with her wisdom and fierce intelligence. Out of his depth, Max finds himself precariously balanced between Sophie and the Sibyl. What's more, Sophie worships the great novelist of questionable morals - and is determined to meet her. A compelling Victorian novel and a playful meditation on the creation of literature, Sophie and the Sibyl balances a tale of courtship and seduction with a fascinating, lively imagining of the writer George Eliot at the end of her boldly unconventional life, and the height of her fame.

A solitary boy in a family of independent, unconventional women, Toby Hawk lives in a small, closed world that consists of school and surfing the Internet. His mother, Isobel, a painter on the brink of commercial success, is only fifteen years his senior and the two share an unusually intimate bond. But everything changes when Isobel takes up with Roehm, a fascinating and enigmatic scientist. As he begins his slow dance of courtship and seduction, alienating mother from son, their world becomes unstable and duplicitous. Toby turns to the Web for clues about his mother's hauntingly irresistible, predatory lover -- and the answers he finds transform his life.

An eerie psychological ghost story with echoes of Faust, Freud, and Frankenstein, "The Deadly Space Between" is a disturbing tale of Oedipal passions -- a rich and dark exploration of sexual ambiguity and longing.

Illuminating the dark side of the erotic, these interwoven stories explore obsession, violence, and the thin line between sex and death. Under a Mediterranean sun a man searches for the Temple of Zeus as his wife awaits her stalker; a sex worker at an illegal fetish club contemplates her options; a strike spirals out of control with eerie consequences; and a conflict with noisy neighbours reaches theatrical heights. Driven by lust, greed and revenge, chillingly calm or maddened by rage, Patricia Duncker's characters use every tool at their disposal to get what they want. Unapologetically disturbing and provocative like the B movies that inspired them, Seven Tales of Sex and Death holds up a mirror to humanity at its most flawed, ruthless and seductive.

Chevalier d'Albert fantasizes about his ideal lover, yet every woman he meets falls short of his exacting standards of female perfection. Embarking on an affair with the lovely Rosette to ease his boredom, he is thrown into tumultuous confusion when she receives a dashing young visitor. Exquisitely handsome, Theodore inspires passions d'Albert never believed he could feel for a man - and Rosette also seems to be in thrall to the charms of her guest. Does this bafflingly alluring person have a secret to hide? Subversive and seductive, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) draws readers into the bedrooms and boudoirs of a French chateau in a compelling exploration of desire and sexual intrigue.