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>To borrow a word from one of our reviewers, I am faced this week with a veritable panoply of book reviews to edit. As is increasingly usual, there is a lot of high-stakes fantasy, a genre that seems to grow ever more political in its themes (or maybe it's just...
>Although it's going to take me forever to get through the academic prose of James F. English's The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard, 2006), it has some heady arguments that I'm enjoying engagement with. One of English's key points, for example, is that...
>"Where am I? is the first demand the wailing infant makes of the world he arrives in. Calmed and comforted, you stop asking after a while, and are soon so adjusted to reality (an adult invention) that you forget the question."--Peter Conrad, Behind the Mountain: Return to Tasmania (Poseidon Press,...
>I'm happy to see that the students in Utah have dodged a bullet--you know, as I typed those words the potential bad taste of the cliche started to worry me, what with our concern for Safe Schools and all, but then I realized that kids are far more likely to...
>Marilyn Sachs meta-fictionalizes Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austen in her new novel, First Impressions (Brodie/Roaring Brook, 2006). After positing in a term paper that P&P is "really a tragedy that just got away from the author" and whose true fulcrum is the hardly-mentioned sister Mary Bennet, Alice is forced...
>Nancy Drew parodies aren't new (one of my favorites is Mabel Maney's Case of the Good-for-Nothing Girlfriend) but Chelsea Cain's Confessions of a Teen Sleuth is exhaustive in trying out the dimensions of a metafictive life. In this "autobiography" (dedicated to Frank Hardy) Nancy is determined to clear up the...
>When it comes to celebrity books, Linda Sue Park asks only for better editing. Because the authors are amateurs and the publicity extensive, Park argues that "with celebrity titles, publishers have even more responsibility than usual to produce a good book," and that to let something by that is second-rate...
>Thank yous, please, to Lolly and her able ally Claire, for formatting and uploading the Clara Breed article I referenced the other day. Here it is. Some of Breed's opinions, such as her implicit (or perhaps cagey) acceptance of the necessity for removal of Japanese-Americans from California for the duration...
>I've just finished reading Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs (Penguin paperback, 2004) and I have a couple of complaints for the publisher. Maisie Dobbs, an Alex Award winner, is an adult novel, kind of a mystery, kind of a romance, kind of an elegy, about a female private eye in 1929...
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