By Taylor Jasmine | On January 23, 2015 | Updated May 11, 2025 | Comments (2)
Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott is a collection of four novellas that reveal another side of the author best known for Little Women.
Louisa May Alcott started her writing career with “blood and thunder” tales that evidently, she rather enjoyed producing, even as they helped her make the money she so needed to earn as a way to support her family.
Each of these stories features sharp-witted, outspoken women. Alcott manages to give each tale a twist, and imbues them with suspense and irony. Four stories are included in this edition, although Alcott wrote several more Gothic tales.
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By Nava Atlas | On January 7, 2015 | Updated July 5, 2023 | Comments (0)
Middlemarch: A Story of Provincial Life by George Eliot is considered by some this esteemed British author’s masterpiece. This is saying a lot, since she produced a number of books that are masterworks in their own right, including The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, and Daniel Deronda.
The 1996 Barnes and Noble edition of Middlemarch offered this succinct summary of the novel, which was originally released in volumes spanning 1871 to 1872: Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On December 31, 2014 | Updated September 16, 2022 | Comments (0)
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896 – 1953), the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and memoirist was known for her writings about her adopted home of Cross Creek, Florida, where she bought an orange grove in the late 1920s and lived for many decades.
She was fascinated by the people and local culture, and gathered her observations into Cross Creek, the memoir discussed here, and a compilation of recipes, Cross Creek Cookery. Both were published in 1942.
Rawlings was attracted to the people of Cross Creek, who were called crackers (though at the time, this wasn’t a disparaging term). At first they were wary of her as an outsider and resisted her eager questions and interest. Eventually they warmed to her, and she began recording detailed descriptions of the people, their dialect, the flora and fauna, and the local food and folkways. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On December 31, 2014 | Updated April 23, 2025 | Comments (0)
The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, published in 1925, is one of this American master’s mid-career novels. The story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter, one might say it tells of a midlife crisis before the term was coined.
When the professor and his wife move into a new house, he begins questioning the path that his life has taken. His daughters have grown up, and he loses much of his will to live, not finding anything to look forward to.
Though it hasn’t achieved the enduring stature of some of Cather’s better-known works, The Professor’s House, in her skilled hands it becomes a touching story of personal and spiritual self-reflection. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On December 30, 2014 | Updated September 16, 2022 | Comments (0)
Lucy Maud (L.M.) Montgomery, author of the ever-popular Anne of Green Gables, was a keen letter-writer. Her letters to George Boyd MacMillan over their thirty-nine year friendship show the full range of her interests, from domestic concerns, her cats, and gardening, to her professional literary career as best-selling author.
When L.M. Montgomery receives the first letter from G.B. MacMillan (in 1903), she is coping with her domestic responsibilities and is struggling to establish herself as a poet and short-story writer with major American and Canadian magazines. Read More→
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