Of a 16-year-old's devotion Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) Avon Books, 1973 This is my original copy of this novel, which I first read when I was sixteen years old. You've seen one like it, right? It's the copy that I remember seeing on the shelves
Judith Viorst’s It’s Hard to be Hip Over Thirty and Other Tragedies of Married Life New American Library, 1968 (Also published by Persephone Books, No. 12) When I was a girl, I used to pull Judith Viorst’s slim volumes off my mother’s bookshelves, but I was always disappointed. And, no
David Bezmozgis' The Free World HarperCollins, 2011 The Krasnansky family is making their way out of Soviet Russia, travelling to Rome. Samuil, the patriarch, is annoyed by the tour guide's suggestion that the history of Western civilization could be plotted along the road that the bus is travelling. "Their history:
Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1983) Women's Press, 1984 Celie begins writing letters to God because the man who is married to her mother has said that's all who will listen, all who should be bothered with listening. (It's just wrong to call him her father, after he has raped
Nicholas Ruddock's The Parabolist Doubleday, 2010 It's ironic. One of the women in Nicholas Ruddock's novel is thinking about the heroines of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. "Look at all those passionate women, the ones in novels, the ones who wore their hearts on their sleeves," she says. "They all
