Welcome to the hunting grounds—or New York (says Melissa Bank, indirectly, through her epigraphs): where an aristocratic herd of blue blazers move along Park Avenue, Manhattan, and run in groups along the Hudson River…where finding a relationship is sort of like lying in wait by a rushing river, in hopes of ensnaring a fish, then…
An “exquisite irony” that happened to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 upon its first publication in 1953 was that edited, censored versions of it (with drugs and profanity removed) began circulating the markets. This was without Bradbury’s knowledge, until 1979 when some teachers and students noticed the difference in their classroom copies, and it reached Bradbury’s…
The image of the Sylvanian family (or Calico Critters are they’re now called) rose to my mind as I began reading the first few chapters of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The Calico Critters are a family of bunnies, squirrels, and other tiny animal figurines that are clothed like pioneers and dwell in the daintiest…