Judith Rossner

The future is looking bright for Caroline Ferrante. She is a gifted chef and irreverent cooking teacher who has just been tapped for her own television cooking show. Her relationship with her upstairs neighbor Leon - a doctor, yet - is thriving. She even seems to get along with Leon's children from his first marriage. But Caroline's past seems determined to undermine her future. The rebellious daughter of Manhattan academics, Caroline dropped out of college and fled to Italy as the mother's helper of family friends. There she was able to pursue her great passion, cooking, while also embarking on an affair with Angelo Ferrante, a volatile Sicilian. In fairly short order she found herself pregnant, married, and a full-time chef at the ristorante where Angelo also worked. The business thrived, and Caroline and Angelo's baby, Olivia, was the light of their lives. Then things started to go sour. Angelo began to quarrel with the restaurant's owners. At home he became increasingly domineering and brazenly unfaithful. And he began to turn his daughter against her mother, using Caroline's Judaism (or rather, his anti-Semitism) as a weapon. Eventually, when Angelo's behavior gave Caroline no choice but to leave Italy, twelve-year-old Olivia chose to stay with her father, refusing even to write or speak to her mother on the phone. Now Angelo has married a woman Olivia hates even more than she remembers hating her mother, so she decides to join Caroline in New York. But Olivia has a great deal of unfinished business with her mother, and Caroline, who'd dreamed of a loving reunion, instead faces a hostile adolescent who misinterprets her every word and action, present as well as past. Indeed, overcoming Olivia's resentment - while navigating a burgeoning career, an intensifying romance, and the treacherous straits of raising a teenager - is as tough as any challenge Caroline has faced. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Judith Rossner laid bare the desperation of the 1970s singles scene. In August, she took readers further inside psychoanalysis than anyone believed a novel could go. Now, with Olivia, she weaves a tale of mothers and daughters, of best intentions and bitter regret, of food and rage and love.

"The plot of Charlotte Smith's autobiographical first novel Emmeline (1788) includes the expected thrills of the eighteenth-century courtship novel: abduction, duels, and a "fairy-tale princess." At the same time, the novel satirically reworks such literary conventions by focusing on the dangers of early engagement and marriage, and challenges a social and legal system in which women are inherently illegitimate subjects." "This Broadview edition includes primary source material relating to the novel's reception; women, marriage, and work; and landscape in eighteenth-century fiction. Mary Hays's biographical writing on Smith is also included, as is selected correspondence."--Jacket.

"Hi, I'm the guy who reads your e-mail, and also, I love you . . . " Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder know that somebody is monitoring their work e-mail. (Everybody in the newsroom knows. It's company policy.) But they can't quite bring themselves to take it seriously. They go on sending each other endless and endlessly hilarious e-mails, discussing every aspect of their personal lives. Meanwhile, Lincoln O'Neill can't believe this is his job now- reading other people's e-mail. When he applied to be "internet security officer," he pictured himself building firewalls and crushing hackers- not writing up a report every time a sports reporter forwards a dirty joke. When Lincoln comes across Beth's and Jennifer's messages, he knows he should turn them in. But he can't help being entertained-and captivated-by their stories. By the time Lincoln realizes he's falling for Beth, it's way too late to introduce himself. What would he say . . . ?

Christa Wolf was arguably the best-known and most influential writer in the former East Germany. Having grown up during the Nazi regime, she and her family were forced to flee their home like many others, nearly starving to death in the process. Her earliest novels were controversial because they contained veiled criticisms of the Communist regime which landed her on government watch lists. Her past continued to permeate her work and her life, as she said, "You can only fight sorrow when you look it in the eye." August is Christa Wolf's last piece of fiction, written in a single sitting as an anniversary gift to her husband. In it, she revisits her stay at a tuberculosis hospital in the winter of 1946, a real life event that was the inspiration for the closing scenes of her 1976 novel Patterns of Childhood.