Mathilda Savitch

Sample

Karen Rivers

Enter the diary of sixteen-year-old Haley, who is in her last year of high school (The Greatest Year of My Life, or TGYML). Haley likes to think she's just a normal girl, plagued with all the normal doubts of a too-smart-for-her-own-good, slightly hypochondriac, hickey-prone teenager. But partway through the year, disaster strikes: Haley comes down with chickenpox; her best friend Jules won't speak to her; the object of her affections, a boy named J.T., won't even look at her; and worst of all, her harmless hippie Dad is in some mysterious trouble with the law. In desperation, Haley turns to the Ouija board and tries to communicate with the Other Side, but this leads to a further, unexpected complication: Why does the dead boy she channels seem more attractive than the real boy who wants to spend time with her? The Healing Time of Hickeys takes the reader on a dizzying and wryly funny journey to discover the answer to this question, and several more that Haley thinks she keeps hidden from everyone.

Sample

Steve Toltz

Liam, a policeman and aspiring author, looks for inspiration to his best friend, Aldo, a hapless criminal with a knack for misfortunes who is trying to win back his ex-wife.

Sample

Tracy Guzeman

Sisters Natalie and Alice Kessler were close until adolescence wrenched them apart. Natalie is a headstrong, manipulative beauty; Alice is a dreamer who loves books and birds. During a lakeside summer holiday, they sit for a family portrait by struggling young painter Thomas Bayber. By summer's end, three lives are shattered. Decades later, Bayber, now a reclusive, world-renowned artist, unveils a never-before-seen work, Kessler Sisters. Bayber asks Dennis Finch, an art history professor, and Stephen Jameson, an eccentric young art authenticator, to sell the painting for him. That task becomes more complicated when the artist requires that they first locate Natalie and Alice, who seem to have vanished.

Sample

Jill Campbell

Examining Henry Fielding's sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, Natural Masques breaks with old critical commonplaces that contrast Fielding's "masculinity" with Samuel Richardson's "feminine" sensibilities. It argues that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered identity appears throughout Fielding's writings, and that Fielding shared that preoccupation with his contemporaries. It therefore offers an argument about Fielding's period as well as about his major works, which are analyzed in connection with a variety of related texts - from satires on the castrati to educational treatises, Whig propaganda, and debates in political theory. Approaching gender as a complex system of relations, Campbell investigates Fielding's treatments of masculine and feminine identities across the arenas of eighteenth-century political, social, and literary conflict and change. The plays with which Fielding began his literary career are particularly explicit concerning his interest in problems of gender. Some of their most recurrent satiric targets - domineering women, castrato singers, beaux - disrupt the expected economy of sexual roles, and Fielding's productions of his own plays often featured the dramatic spectacle of this disruption, with men cast in women's roles, and women in men's. In the opening scenes of Joseph Andrews, Fielding frames his parodic response to Pamela by reversing the sexes of the two participants in Richardson's scenario of embattled chastity. Campbell shows how throughout Fielding's writings, the suspicion that sexual roles are merely assumed - and therefore subject to alteration and appropriation - intimates a more general possibility that personal identity is always in some sense impersonated, incoherent, mutable. . Campbell draws on recent work that sees the eighteenth century as a crucial moment in the history of sexuality and gender, and she critiques new treatments of the novel's function in defining domestic femininity.