A Reading Group Guide

“Heaven is a place where artful little books are as big as this.” —Janet Maslin, CBS Sunday Morning Susie Salmon is 14. She likes peppermint-stick ice cream, art class,

and a boy named Ray Singh who kissed her in front of her locker one

afternoon when she was still alive. Now she is in heaven. It’s a place

where all her simplest desires are fulfilled, but not her dearest wish

of all: to be back home with her family.

PHOTO: JERRY BAUER So Susie must watch as those left behind on earth struggle to cope

with her disappearance: Her school friends trade worried rumors, “SEBOLD’S her killer tries to cover his tracks, and her family is by turns torn writing achieves an apart and drawn closer together by their grief and love. Gradually, exquisite balance between Susie explores her new otherworldly home, tests the boundaries sadness and hopefulness. between the living and the dead, and begins to understand that even The nerve-ending pain of in the wake of tragedy there will be laughter and joy for the people great loss and the promise she cares about. of life’s inevitable With tenderness, humor, and the astonishing voice of an unforgettable march forward.” heroine, builds out of a family’s unthinkable

loss a story full of promise and hope. —Maria Russo, WashingtonWashington PostPost BookBook WorldWorld

1 What readers and critics say about ’s THE LOVELY BONES

“Savagely beautiful....A strange and compelling novel.” “A stunning achievement.” — —MONICA WOOD, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “THE LOVELY BONES is a book that truly defies a pat Sebold deals with almost unthink- “Mesmerizing.... description. The subject is not death, or life, but how close able subjects with humor and intelligence and a kind of mysterious grace....THE LOVELY BONES takes the stuff of the two really are....Be warned: This is a book neighborhood tragedy—the unexplained disappearance of a you will have a hard time forgetting.” child, the shattered family alone with its grief—and turns it –SARAH DESSEN, RALEIGH NEWS & OBSERVER into literature.” —KATHERINE BOUTON, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Don’t start THE LOVELY BONES unless you can finish it. The book begins with more horror than you could imagine, “A novel that is painfully fine and but closes with more beauty than you could hope accomplished, one which readers will have their own for....Alice Sebold has done something difficulties relinquishing, long after the last page is turned.” miraculous here.” —PAULA L. WOODS, TIMES —RON CHARLES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

“So this is what heaven is like. It comes bottled “The most touching and yet bracing imagining in a blue drink of a book and reads like a fairy tale....Sebold of what the dead may have to say to the living that I’ve read has worked wonders.” in a long time.” —MARTA SALIJ, DETROIT FREE PRESS —KAREN VALBY, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY “Here is a writer who honors fiction’s primary gift—the “An audacious novel....THE LOVELY BONES seems infinity of possibilities—by following her imagination to to be saying there are more important things in life on earth wondrous and terrifying places.” than retribution. Like forgiveness, like love.” —KAREN SANDSTROM, CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER —CONAN PUTNAM, CHICAGO TRIBUNE “A haunting meditation on family and youth, loss, “THE LOVELY BONES is a story you’ll want to pretend was love, and redemption. It is a book that startles and rewards written for yourself alone.” on page after page, a book that rivets attention from its —U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT simple opening lines…Susie’s voice is the key ingredient in the brilliant magic of THE LOVELY BONES. She is the voice “A keenly observed portrait of familial love and of promise unfulfilled, life cut short, forever young, but also how it endures and changes over time....A deeply affecting achingly real.” meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can –JOHN MARSHALL, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER be redeemed—slowly, grudgingly, and in fragments— through love and acceptance.” “A luminescent debut novel.” —MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NEW YORK TIMES —JOY PRESS, VILLAGE VOICE

“There aren’t many writers who could pull off a story “A triumphant novel....The breakout fiction debut about a dead girl, narrated by that dead girl—from heaven, of the year....It’s a knockout.” —, TIME no less. But this astonishingly assured novel has wit, affection, and just the right amount of heart.” —SARA NELSON, GLAMOUR 2 3 The Oddity of Suburbia Questions for Discussion by Alice Sebold

My family was watching television when a couple—the mother 1. In Susie’s Heaven, she is surrounded by things that bring her peace. and father to a woman who lived one street over with her family—were hit What would your Heaven be like? Is it surprising that in Susie’s inward, by a car and landed on our front lawn. The man who hit them leapt out of his personal version of the hereafter there is no God or larger being that car and shouted to two boys playing basketball in the driveway of the house presides? across from ours. He yelled: “These people need an ambulance.”He then 2. Why does Ruth become Susie’s main connection to Earth? Was it proceeded to jump back in his car and drive three houses down, where he accidental that Susie touched Ruth on her way up to Heaven, or was Ruth calmly parked in his own driveway and went inside his house. The daughter actually chosen to be Susie’s emotional conduit? of the couple who had been hit had been walking behind her parents and, 3. Rape is one of the most alienating experiences imaginable. Susie’s rape having lapped them once, now came up upon the scene. We heard the ends in murder and changes her family and friends forever. Alienation is screaming and ran out. Both of her parents were killed. One died on our transferred, in a sense, to Susie’s parents and siblings. How do they each lawn, the other died later, in a hospital. And the man who struck them? He experience loneliness and solitude after Susie’s death? was both one of our neighbors and, by profession, a paramedic. 4. Why does the author include details about Mr. Harvey’s childhood and As I grew upand left home, living in Manhattan and just outside L.A., I his memories of his mother? By giving him a human side, does Sebold get began to realize more and more that within the suburban world of my us closer to understanding his motivation? Sebold explained in an inter- upbringing there were as many strange stories as there were in the more view about the novel that murderers “are not animals but men,”and that romanticized parts of the world. Ultimately, the East Village had nothing on is what makes them so frightening. Do you agree? Nowhere U.S.A. and I returned, after several failed attempts at “the urban novel,”to the material I knew best. Of course, I found the elements for THE 5. Discuss the way in which guilt manifests itself in the various characters— LOVELY BONES in a combination of things, but a major element in its pages Jack, Abigail, Lindsay, Mr. Harvey, Len Fenerman. is the oddness of what we often condescendingly refer to as the suburbs. 6. “Pushing on the inbetween” is how Susie describes her efforts to connect In those places—like the place where I grew up—where all the houses of a with those she has left behind on Earth. Have you ever felt as though particular development share the same floor plan or, in upper end versions someone was trying to communicate with you from “the inbetween?” of recent years, vary among three or four, live people with lives much more 7. Does Buckley really see Susie, or does he make up a version of his sister as complex than the architecture containing them would suggest. But it took a way of understanding and not being too emotionally damaged by her me years to go home again in my mind and imagination. To see the incidents death? How do you explain tragedy to a child? Do you think Susie’s par- that occurred all around me as a child and as a teenager as worthy of narra- ents do a good job of helping Buckley comprehend the loss of his sister? tive. But growing up in one of many supposed Nowhere U.S.A.’s has created 8. for me a bottomless well of narrative ideas. Susie is killed just as she was beginning to see her mother and father as real people, not just as parents. Watching her parents’ relationship Who would have thought that the place I most despised growing up—where change in the wake of her death, she begins to understand how they react I felt like the weirdest freak and the biggest loser—would turn out to be a to the world and to each other. How does this newfound understanding gift to me. But what I have finally, to my joy, been made aware of is that affect Susie? while I grew up hearing that there were ‘a thousand stories in the naked city and none of them the same,’ this was as true of the look-alike houses all 9. Can Abigail’s choice to leave her family be justified? around me as it was of the places I lived as an adult. The difference perhaps is that you have to look harder in the suburbs, past the floor plans and into the human heart.

4 5 Words to Live By The author of THE LOVELY BONES talks with David Mehegan of the BostonBoston GlobeGlobe. . 10. Why does Abigail leave her dead daughter’s photo outside the Chicago Nothing about Alice Sebold would suggest that she has been the most popu- Airport on her way back to her family? lar novelist in America for the last seven months—not her casual clothes nor 11. Susie observes that “The living deserve attention, too.”She watches her the Spanish-style bungalow that she shares with her husband, novelist Glen sister, Lindsay, being neglected as those around her focus all their David Gold. Sebold, 40, is reflective, relaxed, often quite funny, and deter- attention on grieving for Susie. Jack refuses to allow Buckley to use mined that her quiet writing life will go on, despite all that has happened Susie’s clothes in his garden. When is it time to let go? since July. 12. Susie’s Heaven seems to have different stages, and climbing to the next That’s when her first novel, THE LOVELY BONES, was published. It’s about stage of Heaven requires her to remove herself from what happens on Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who has been raped and murdered. Susie Earth. What is this process like for Susie? narrates from heaven the murder and the later histories of her family, 13. In THE LOVELY BONES, adult relationships (Abigail and Jack, Ray’s friends, and the killer. Sebold and publisher Little, Brown had hoped for a parents) are dysfunctional and troubled, whereas the young relation- good first-novel sale for the unorthodox narrative—a few thousand copies ships (Lindsay and Samuel, Ray and Susie, Ray and Ruth) all seem to would be considered a success. What they got was the biggest-selling novel have depth, maturity, and potential. What is the author saying about of 2002. Nielsen BookScan, the book tracking service, places THE LOVELY young love? About the trials and tribulations of married life? BONES at the top for last year, with 1.5 million copies sold, ahead of such power authors as J. K. Rowling, Tom Clancy, and John Grisham. After 34 14. Is Jack Salmon allowing himself to be swallowed up by his grief? Is weeks on hardcover fiction bestseller list, THE LOVELY there a point where he should have let go? How does his grief process BONES is in its 20th printing, with at least 2.37 million copies in print. In affect his family? Is there something admirable about holding on so addition, Lucky, Sebold’s 1999 memoir of her rape, has spent 22 weeks on the tightly to Susie’s memory and not denying his profound sadness? New York Times paperback list. 15. The scene in which Susie inhabits Ruth’s body and fulfills one of her On the surface, the phenomenon is another example of the unpredictability greatest wishes—making love with Ray—is the most supernatural part of readers’ tastes and needs, and of how word-of-mouth praise, smart of the novel. Is it difficult to make this leap of faith with the author? Do marketing, and lucky breaks can come together to put a book into orbit. On you think there are times when we do things to satisfy the wishes of a personal level, though, Sebold’s own story illustrates how writing, and the those in Heaven, who are unable to achieve their own unfulfilled writer’s life, rescued her from a sinkhole of trauma, isolation, and despair. dreams on Earth? One night during her freshman year at in 1981, Sebold 16. Ray and Susie’s final physical experience (via Ruth’s body)seems to act was jumped from behind, punched, and dragged at knife point into a tunnel almost as an exorcism that sweeps away, if only temporarily, Susie’s entrance to an amphitheater. The man forced her to strip in the cold dark- memory of her rape. What is the significance of this act for Susie, and ness, then raped her. Police later told her she was lucky; a previous rape vic- does it serve to counterbalance the violent act that ended Susie’s life? tim had been killed. 17. Alice Sebold seems to be saying that out of tragedy comes healing. Seventeen years later, after wrestling with drugs and despair, she wrote about Susie’s family fractures and comes back together, a town learns to find her experience in Lucky: the rape, the 1982 trial in which the rapist was con- strength in each other. Do you agree that good can come of great trauma? victed and sent to prison, and especially the lingering, bitter aftermath. The psychological trauma, Sebold wrote, isolated her from friends, lovers, other

6 7 rape victims, and family. Even her father, shocked and confused, wanted to 1995, when she decided to try another master’s program in creative writing at know: “How could he have raped you unless you let him?” the University of California at Irvine. She met on her first The damage, she says, can fester under layers of time and change, and an day of class. In time they became a couple, but he vowed he wouldn’t propose ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound. “There is no way to her until his own first novel was accepted. His Carter Beats the Devil was you can tell someone in that moment what you are experiencing,”she says, published in 2001, and they were married that year. “that their behavior does nothing but alienate you, makes you experience At Irvine, Susie Salmon, the main character of THE LOVELY BONES, your own alienation.” was born. Sebold returned to college in the fall of 1981 and took a poetry workshop with Sebold says she had been working on another book, but “I was not compelled poet Tess Gallagher, who urged her to write about her experience. Sebold by it. I went and read some poems and came back to the desk and wrote that did, beginning with the line “If they caught you…”Not long after, she spotted first chapter in one sitting. So Susie came upon me more than me deciding, the rapist on the street and went to the police, who arrested him. Gallagher ‘I’m going to write about a teenager, she’ll be dead and speaking from heaven.’ helped her a second time by going with her to the preliminary hearing, where That idea of a shadow that travels with you, that has another destiny than you she had to come face to face with the defendant. might have imagined, has always fascinated me. For me, that shadow has ‘I HAD CHANGED’ always been a teenage girl who died.” Sebold graduated but still struggled to put the rape behind her. In Lucky, she In the book, Susie gazes down from “my heaven,”which seems to be a com- wrote, “I had changed….In my world, I saw violence everywhere.”She bination of park and playground. She wants to help her loved ones, or lead entered a master’s program in poetry at the but soon them to the man who killed her. But like Sebold in the aftermath of her rape, washed out. She went to New York, rented a room on the Lower East Side, Susie can’t break through a frustrating, invisible barrier between herself and worked as a hostess in a midtown club, and began “dabbling” in heroin, others. snorting the drug with her boyfriend. (She says she never became addicted.) Sebold worked on the book in her Irvine fiction workshop, which was led at Sebold was writing, too; her first novel, Tripping, in 1986 was nominated in one point by novelist Margot Livesey of Cambridge. “She struck me as manuscript for a Pushcart Prize, but it was never published. immensely determined as a writer,”Livesey recalls. “She had a strong sense She could have been ruined by drugs but in 1989 was offered an interview for of the novel. Though she acknowledged that the premise was far-fetched, a job at New York’s Hunter College. They were desperate for an adjunct there was a real ambition, a desire to make the book as good as possible.” instructor; she had teaching experience from graduate school and had stud- Still, it was hard going, and Sebold realized that before she could finish ied with Gallagher and Tobias Wolff at Syracuse. It was a part-time job— Susie’s story, there was another book about a young rape victim that she had teaching freshman composition—but Sebold discovered she liked teaching to write. young writers and was good at it. And it helped stabilize her life. In Lucky, she HEALING PROCESS writes, “My students became the people who kept me alive.”Eventually she dumped the boyfriend, moved uptown, gave up heroin. She went back to Syracuse and researched everything that had happened to her in 1981, scouring police, medical, and court records. She interviewed the She wrote short stories and a second novel—none published—but mostly she investigator and prosecutor. The result was Lucky, an unflinching account worked with student writers, at Hunter, New York University, Bucknell that she says was cathartic and healing, for her parents as much as herself. University, and other colleges. She taught at Hunter for almost 10 years until Back at work on Susie’s story, she finally showed 150 pages to her agent, “My students became the people who kept me alive.”

8 9 Henry Dunow of New York. “I thought it was brilliant,”Dunow says, “as the early chapters. It is haunting and persuasive and memorable.” startling and moving a batch of pages as I had seen in years.”He sent it to Scribner, the publisher of Lucky, which had an option to make a first offer on “From a parent’s point of view,”says Dunow, “that first chapter is almost Sebold’s second book. unbearable, but Alice pulls you through with a message of healing that speaks to people.” “There was a polite but modest offer,”Dunow says. “They were nervous about the subject in two dimensions: the violence toward a child and the Some critics dismissed THE LOVELY BONES as a crude anodyne. In a heavenly narrator.” scathing review in The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn called its success “symptomatic of a larger cultural dysfunction” and sneered at the He declined the offer. Several other publishers turned the book down, but novel’s “proleptic yearning for relief…its emphasis on the bathetic appeal of Little, Brown snapped it up with an offer Dunow describes as “a good level victimhood, its pseudo-therapeutic lingo of healing.” for a first novel but not a spectacular deal by any means.”Sebold buckled down and finished the book. Sebold shrugs at that view. “I have my own beliefs, and that’s certainly reflect- ed in my characters,”she says. “I have a tendency to feel that it’s possible to From there, THE LOVELY BONES built momentum like a runaway train. keep hope alive and that sometimes in the darkest circumstances that’s all An excerpt appeared in Seventeen magazine, and the reader response was you’ve got going for you. If that makes me disgusting, I embrace my disgust.” electric. At Book Expo America, the big spring trade show, booksellers were so excited that Little, Brown had to print more advance reader copies, which The least-expected difficulty of her fantastic success—her fans’ desire for a is almost unheard of. It instantly became a Book-of-the-Month Club more personal connection—occurs most often at book signings. “There are selection. Then, just weeks before the book hit the shelves, a huge break: people who are hoping that you can give them something,”she says. “They Novelist Anna Quindlen told Today show viewers, “If you only have time to come up and tell me of a person they had lost, sometimes a child or a parent. read one book this summer, it’s THE LOVELY BONES.” I want to be able to acknowledge people, but if there are 200 in line, you have 30 seconds to do it.” The book exploded out of the gate, pushed in part by Michiko Kakutani’s rave review in The New York Times. On July 14, THE LOVELY BONES hit the Sebold seems well insulated from hype, criticism, celebrity, or the commercial New York Times bestseller list and hasn’t dropped off since. publishing marketplace. She likes a quiet life, has few close friends, and makes new ones slowly. Sebold says she doesn’t know why THE LOVELY BONES resonates with so many people. “I don’t feel particularly connected to what is going on in society. Money and fame are OK, she makes clear, but the most important effect of This book was not calculated in any way,”she says. “If I were a savvy her success is the unfettered freedom to do the thing she loves best: write. calculator, I would have published my first novel before I was 39.” “I want to work on my next book,”she says, “and try to be here to garden a little Without intending to, Sebold touched a nerve in America, having to do with in the fall, and read. the horror of lost children and the healing from unimaginable loss. Some say I’m married to the man I want to be married to, live in a certain way that I like the reader response had to do with still-raw emotions after Sept. 11, others living. It’s very weird to succeed at 39 years old and realize that in the midst of relate it to the several infamous child murders in the last year. your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.” “When a book is both good and well published,”Livesey says, “success may David Mehegan’s article on Alice Sebold and THE LOVELY BONES originally appeared in seem self-evident. But other books are good and well published and not on the Boston Globe on February 25, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Globe Newspaper Co. the bestseller list. I do think there is something radiant and heartfelt about (MA). Reprinted with permission.

“I want to work on my next book and try to be here to garden a little in the fall, and read.”

10 11 Also by Alice Sebold PRAISE FOR LUCKY

MORE THAN SIX MONTHS ON THE NEW YORK TIMESTIMES BESTSELLER LIST “A literary memoir that shines with personality. There is such openness in Sebold’s brash, vibrant style that the book feels like the long version of a friend’s breathless account of an ordeal.” —CARMEN SCHNEIDEL, TIME OUT NEW YORK “A rueful, razor-sharp memoir…funnier than you’d think was possible....Sebold’s commanding skill as a narrator (at her best, describing the awful crime itself, she brings to mind a fierce young Joan Didion) forces you to relive her terror....She tells what it’s like to go through a particular kind of nightmare in order to tell what it’s like—slowly, bumpily, triumphantly—to heal.” —SARAH KERR, VOGUE lucky “Gruesome and strangely enchanting....The quiet achievement of Sebold’s memoir is that she handles her subject with the integrity of a journalist and the care of a survivor.” —CASEY GREENFIELD, NEWSDAY “LUCKY is exhilarating to read…sharp-eyed and unsentimental....The ironic, nervy Sebold refused to let the experience diminish her…or her sense of humor.” —FRANCINE PROSE, ELLE “LUCKY—which reads like a John Grisham page-turner—can’t help but haunt you....Sebold’s is a story about having the courage to speak about the unspeakable.” —SHERYL ALTMAN, BIOGRAPHY “Stunningly crafted and unsparing....A memoir that reads like Alice Sebold was an 18-year-old college freshman when she was detective fiction....Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus on the last night of inspire and challenge.” school. The police told her she was lucky to be alive—and that dubious —KIRKUS REVIEWS “luck” is the focus of this fiercely observed memoir. What animates the “Sebold’s opening scene is as gripping and terrifying as any in a story of her recovery is Sebold’s indomitable spirit—as she withstands film....Her voice is a powerful new plea to break the silence that the sometimes hapless efforts of family and friends to provide comfort still clings to this taboo, and little understood, subject.” and support, and as, ultimately, she triumphs, managing through grit —JOAN ULLMAN, CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER and remarkable coincidence to help in securing her attacker’s arrest “Give Alice Sebold your attention for her first five pages and you’re and conviction. In a narrative by turns disturbing, thrilling, and inspiring, in for the whole ride.” —SARAH ECKHOFF, SALON Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims even as she imparts wisdom profoundly hard-won: “You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”

12 13 Alice Sebold’s Suggestions for Further Reading Short Stories The Collected Stories by William Trevor This is, at best, a partial, partial, partial list of books I love. I’ve tried to provide a This is a large and meaty collection of a master short story writer. He is such an incredible writer, so variety—nonfiction and fiction, and a few biographies that are both amazingly written funny, so deft. These stories are condensed jewels. The very best. and lead the reader toward finding the books or creations of the subjects written Birds of America by Lorrie Moore about. Some are new and some not so new. Pursue them and you will be rewarded. This is another collection that combines many of the author’s best stories. No one writes like Moore Above all, keep reading! —A.S. or uses language like her. How she works an image brings instant delight. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates Best known for his novel Revolutionary Road, this is the Yates book I return to again and again. He reveals the dark layers of an individual’s soul like no one else can. Novels Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles Nonfiction A 1947 masterpiece of comedy—dark, dark, dark comedy—concerning the adventures of two Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature by Arthur Krystal women who live entirely by pursuing their desires, no matter how fleeting, irrational, or inexplicable. I love books about reading or, in this collection of essays by the curmudgeonly Krystal, why we Told with compassion, wit, and elegance, it’s like an movie gone terribly awry. shouldn’t read, why all modern literature is dead, why life is horrendous but we keep trying to pre- So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell vail. Sometimes a smart man in a bad mood is just my cup of tea. A classic. In 135 pages, you live a world away in a landscape where memory evokes a lost world and Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman lost youth. Maxwell is a master stylist. Fadiman, who also wrote the incredible book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (hint, a rec- Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin ommendation inside a recommendation!), is in love with books and shares this love in a slender Again, a classic. And again a novel under 200 pages that brings you into another place and time— collection of essays that makes a fine companion for anyone who has ever taken solace in the beauty set in Paris in the 1950s, it tells the story of one man’s search and discovery of his sexual identity. and life-sustaining path that being a committed reader can provide. Beautiful stuff! Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women’s Lives, from Virginia Woolf to Germaine Greer The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald by Kennedy Fraser This is my favorite of Sebald’s stunning novels. His ability to condense and crystallize memory I bought and gave away so many copies of this book, I need to buy a new one for myself. This is a makes his work so evocative—like extended prose poems that lead into the heart and brain of the personal and political book in its study of how creative achievement and male love often conflict and reader. Four imagined biographies of Germans in exile that combine photographs and documents in the struggle to have both that remains a persistent challenge. Plus, again, Kennedy is a superb stylist. the text. A different kind of book. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez Oh to have a big wonderful bio—a biographer more than equal to her subject—a wealth of For those of you who loved Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and are having a fit of Woolfishness, photographs to illustrate the exquisite episodes in Colette’s colorful life and consistent revelations this slender book is absolutely delectable. It tells the true story of Virginia and Leonard’s pet mar- provided by the author on how Colette fit into and was defined by her time. Yum! (A beautiful bridge moset. Nunez is deeply intelligent on the period and uses this brief (116 pages) moment in time to to Colette’s work. My favorite: My Mother’s House & Sido) tell us about the Woolfs as well as the world on the verge of war. How to Read a Poem—And Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration by Edward Wow! This is a biggie and a beauty. Rich, lusty, smart, and funny. Faber never allows his knowledge of the period to overwhelm the narrative. It flounces and pulses and vibrates. When a book is long it Hirsch In my ongoing desire to bring more people with me into my first love, I recommend these two better be good and this one is! Hirsch books. He is a fine poet and his love of poetry is articulated here passionately. Anyone who has ever wanted to write or have insight into the creative process will find The Demon and the Angel very revealing. And to round out the novel section, four classics that I return to and reread: The Ambassadors by Henry James; Middlemarch by George Eliot; Anna Karenina by Leo And again, closing out this list of five nonfiction books (okay more, really) with some Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsy (the newest wonderful reads (I am a sucker for short acute bios of women and for analysis of translation is a world of difference—a true discovery); The House of Mirth by Edith these bios!): Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women by Alfred Allan Lewis; Passionate Minds Wharton; and Anthony Trollope novels for the joy of abundance! by Claudia Roth Pierpont; Alice James: A Biography by Jean Strouse; and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm. Check them out!

14 15 NOTES

Alice Sebold’s THE LOVELY BONES is available in hardcover from Little, Brown and Company. LUCKY is now available in paperback Little, Brown and Company from Back Bay Books. An AOL Time Warner Book Group Company www.twbookmark.com

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