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Who said the Cold War is dead? The United States and Russia are at odds over Ukraine. Putin thinks Obama is a wimp. And Russia harbors Edward Snowden after he leaks American spy secrets. What great timing for the real-life Cold War thriller, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book.

This cloak-and-dagger account reveals the intriguing details of how the novel Doctor Zhivago came to be published during the height of the Cold War. Written by Russian poet Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago was kept under wraps by its author, who feared retribution from the Soviet government for the book’s critical portrayal of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its tepid treatment of socialism. After the novel was published in Italy in 1957, it became a bestseller, capturing the Nobel Prize for Literature and later inspiring an Oscar-winning film adaptation. But how Doctor Zhivago became an international sensation is almost as complex as the tortured love affair between protagonist Dr. Yuri Zhivago and his beloved Lara.

Pasternak’s novel was smuggled out of Russia by an Italian publishing scout who was entrusted with the manuscript. Pasternak’s simple instructions: “This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.”

The smuggling was only the start of the intrigue. After the novel was published in Italian, the CIA saw Doctor Zhivago as a tool to spread dissent within Russia. So the CIA published copies of Doctor Zhivago in Russian and had them smuggled back into the Soviet Union. The release of Doctor Zhivago within Russia not only intensified Cold War tensions, it put Pasternak’s life at risk. He was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and subjected to KBG harassment until his death in 1960.

The Zhivago Affair is a well-crafted work with the kind of eloquent writing that makes it read like a spy novel. Co-author Peter Finn, national security editor of the Washington Post and a former Moscow bureau chief, has written extensively about Snowden and the NSA, which helps bring insight and perspective to The Zhivago Affair. Petra Couvée, a writer, translator and teacher at Saint Petersburg State University, brings her vast knowledge of Russian language, history and culture. Together, the two have produced a book rich in nuance and detail about international politics and the surprising ways in which the words of one author can enlighten the world.

Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature

The San Francisco literary revolution

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

As 19th-century San Francisco evolved from a rowdy Gold Rush boomtown into the financial center of the American West, its rambunctious poets and writers—especially the self-styled Bohemians—sought to bring a skeptical, caustic, humorous Western voice to American writing that had been long dominated by the relatively staid literary eminences of Boston and New York.

This not-so-quiet literary revolution is the story San Francisco-born writer Ben Tarnoff tells in his well-researched, well-told The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature. Tarnoff focuses on four writers—Charles Warren Stoddard, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte and Mark Twain—whose lives converged in San Francisco in 1863.

As Tarnoff’s narrative begins, Harte, “a shy, soft-spoken dandy” and a talented editor, was the most famous Western storyteller in the country. The young Twain, recently arrived from Nevada, was best known for a few callow journalistic stunts and was unsure enough of his talents that he would soon consider giving up writing altogether and returning to life on the river in Missouri. The forever-boyish Stoddard, a “dreamy and frail” poet, struggled with his sexuality and only found himself as a person and as a writer when he ventured to the South Seas. Coolbrith, perhaps the most tragic figure in this story, was a poet with some talent, but she was increasingly shackled by financial responsibilities, first for her ailing mother and then for her orphaned nieces and nephews. She could never fully develop her gifts but, as an Oakland librarian, influenced writers like Jack London, and was named California’s first poet laureate near the end of her life.

Tarnoff alternates his narrative among these four aspiring writers struggling to achieve something new. He vividly describes a vibrant 10-year period when San Francisco was adjusting to the impacts of the Civil War and the arrival of the transcontinental railroad. But the strongest and most fascinating strand of Tarnoff’s story focuses on the friendship and rivalry between Harte and Twain. This sad drama offers important insights into how young Twain—by turns helped and hindered by an increasingly irrational and vainglorious Harte—became the great American writer he was.

American History, Literature

Literature American History

A slice of 20th century life in literature

Review by Anne Bartlett

by Anne Bartlett

When The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, it got a decidedly tepid reception. Reviews were mixed, sales were deeply disappointing. F. Scott Fitzgerald just couldn’t get it together to write anything serious, some critics said. The book seemed too ephemeral to many readers—ripped from the headlines, like an episode of “Law and Order” today.

Of course, opinion has changed, and we now see Gatsby as a timeless classic. To Americans educated on the symbolism of the green light on the dock, the early response seems mysterious. But, as literary historian Sarah Churchwell explains in her fascinating Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, it really wasn’t.

Gatsby was actually much more rooted in its contemporary scene than we remember. Fitzgerald got his ideas for the novel in a particular time and place: New York City and environs in late 1922, when he and wife Zelda were very young, very famous and usually drunk out of their minds. The self-destructive tendencies that soon destroyed them were already sadly in evidence.

Churchwell guides us through the formation of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby ideas, as much as it can be recreated, by following the couple’s lives during that time, and blending their story with what was going on around them. Fitzgerald himself noted a number of the influences, in a terse outline he wrote years later. But Churchwell also takes particular interest in the then-notorious Hall-Mills double murder in New Jersey.

What a murder it was: An adulterous couple, a minister and a choir singer, were found slain under a lover’s lane apple tree. The minister’s wife was rich; the choir singer’s husband was a janitor; a weird person known as “the Pig Woman” claimed to have seen the crime. New Jersey authorities so botched the case that it was never solved (though Churchwell pretty clearly has her own suspect.)

Fitzgerald only mentioned it once in an interview, but Churchwell makes a good case that it subtly underlies Gatsby. Think about it: A downmarket Madame Bovary has an affair with an upper class guy and ends up dead. Her husband is a hapless working-class stiff. Sound anything like Myrtle, Tom and George from Gatsby?

As Churchwell emphasizes, Myrtle’s death is not the Hall-Mills case any more than newspaperman Bayard Swope’s parties are Gatsby’s parties or Gatsby is a bootlegger named Gerlach. Fitzgerald was an artist, not a writer of romans a clef. But Churchwell has produced an intriguing glimpse into how his mind worked, as he mined the Jazz Age innovations that still shape our world.

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Biography

Henry’s journey to Walden Pond

Review by Catherine Hollis

by Catherine Hollis

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, February 2014

Wild, irregular and free, Henry Thoreau cut a distinctive figure in 19th-century Concord, Massachusetts, whether carving “dithyrambic dances” on ice skates with Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne or impressing Ralph Waldo Emerson with his “comic simplicity.” More at home in the woods than in society, Thoreau began the first volume of his celebrated journals with a simple word that also functioned as his motto: solitude.

But Thoreau was hardly a recluse, as accomplished nature writer Michael Sims shows in The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, an amiable and fresh take on the legendary sage of Walden Pond. As a friend, brother and teacher, Thoreau had many relationships that were critical to his development as a writer and thinker. Whether unconsciously imitating the speech of his beloved mentor Emerson or grieving the death of his brother John, Thoreau was as capable of deep feeling for humans as he was of delighting in the mouse, the fox and the New England pole bean.

By focusing his book on the young Henry, Sims gives us an animated portrait of an uncertain writer and reluctant schoolmaster. He portrays the questing, struggling, stubborn Henry, constantly asking “what is life?” and finding it, most often, in the woods and on the rivers. Henry’s two-week boating trip with his brother John on the Concord and Merrimack rivers shows Henry at his best, singing and paddling and living off the land like the Native Americans he so admired. Henry’s tracking abilities—his sharp eye for an arrowhead or a long-abandoned fire pit—were developed by studying the land as intently as he translated Pindar or Goethe. His time living in the woods led him ever closer to an appreciation for reading the landscape, as in his months-long winter project to study the ice and plumb the depths of Walden Pond.

As in his well-received 2011 portrait of E.B. White, The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Sims has found another subject who brilliantly bridges the worlds of nature and thought. Like White, who visited Walden Pond in 1939 to pay tribute to his predecessor, Thoreau found in plants and animals and seasonal cycles his most enduring material. Similarly, Sims has once again proven himself to be a distinctive writer on the subjects of human nature and humans in nature.

Literature

Literature

Brief encounters with flesh-and-blood writers

Review by Robert Weibezahl

by Robert Weibezahl

By its very nature, most literary reportage is ephemeral. A review or author interview tied to the publication of a new book serves its intended purpose—helping to bring the book to the public’s attention and spur some sales—but few of these pieces have lasting value. So, gathering a collection of writer profiles that first ran in newspapers a decade or more ago may seem, on the face of things, a foolhardy endeavor.

But John Freeman’s How to Read a Novelist, which gathers 55 short pieces this notable critic wrote on assignment for papers around the world, is an exception. It is worth our attention for two reasons. First, Freeman has included mostly writers whose work has a lasting or at least universal appeal. There are a fair share of Nobel Laureates among them, including Nadine Gordimer, Mo Yan, Doris Lessing, Günter Grass, Imre Kertész and Toni Morrison, as well as many winners of the National Book Award, NBCC Award, Pulitzer, Booker and other major awards. Alongside such giants as Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Joyce Carol Oates and David Foster Wallace, are less mainstream writers such as Kenya’s Ng?g? wa Thiong’o, Libyan expatriate Hisham Matar, and the Bosnian American Aleksandar Hemon.

The second strength of the book is what Freeman himself brings to these encounters. A perceptive critic, he remains transparent in most of these profiles, and yet his careful reading of the writers’ work informs and shapes the pieces. By his own admission, he focuses less on literary craft and tries instead to identify the essence of each subject’s art by what they reveal in conversation. Sometimes their concerns are political, sometimes personal and sometimes, as with Atwood or Dave Eggers, they are focused on broader issues of keeping literature alive or connecting with readers.

Freeman’s infectious enthusiasm for literature keeps us interested. “I have always felt there is something electrifying about meeting novelists,” he writes. “It has to do with grasping that the creator of a fictional world, a universe that lives inside you as a reader while also feeling strangely disembodied, is not as interior as that world but alive: flesh and blood. In this fashion, I wanted the pieces I wrote about novelists to describe an encounter, to show to the reader what the writer revealed to me.”

Freeman largely succeeds in this mission; these brief encounters illuminate familiar work and inspire one to read the less familiar. Some pieces are more successful than others, of course—that is the nature of the beast in a collection this broad-based. Predictably, some writers are less forthcoming than a reader might wish. Yet even less compelling profiles, written with breezy insight, warrant a read and make How to Read a Novelist a companionable literary compendium.

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Lessons from treasured books

Review by bookpagedev

by Dean Schneider

In Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book, Anita Silvey offers a guided tour to children’s books that have changed lives. “The act of reading to a child is the most important contribution to the future of our society that adults can make,” Silvey writes in the book’s introduction. She asked more than 100 celebrated individuals from all walks of life to choose a special book from their own childhood that had changed the way they see the world.

The volume is divided into six categories—including inspiration, motivation and storytelling—within which are essays, excerpts from some of the children’s books themselves and sidebars about the books and their authors. Cardiothoracic surgeon William DeVries, who implanted the first artificial heart, writes about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the Tin Woodman’s quest for a heart. Steve Wozniak read the Tom Swift books as a kid and grew up to invent the Apple computer. Historian David McCullough recalls Robert Lawson’s Ben and Me, which demonstrated to him how good historical literature employs humor, wisdom and imagination.

Maurice Sendak, though, seems to be a dissenting voice in this collection: “Books shouldn’t teach. They shouldn’t give lessons. . . . They can just be kids and enjoy reading and looking at a book.” It’s a point well taken; the worst of children’s literature is the intentionally inspirational, the stories that reduce too easily to a conscious moral. But the books in Silvey’s collection don’t fall into that group. These books have inspired, touched and motivated through their power as good stories. This volume—perfect for any gift-giving occasion—will inspire adults to enhance their family lives and contribute to the future of our society through the good books they choose to share with their children.

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Shakespeare, he’s in the alley

Review by bookpagedev

by Diann Blakely

Published on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s sonnets, So Long As Men Can Breathe is Christopher Heylin’s riveting account of the tangled publication history of one of our literature’s most famous, and infamously mysterious, volumes. Heylin begins by defining “booklegs,” essentially bootlegs, arguing that the Sonnets are in fact the most well known “booklegs” of all. He then makes an extended comparison between Shakespeare and Dylan.

Why all the Bob Dylan references? It’s difficult to think of a musician as “bootlegged” as Dylan, for whom Heylin has served as biographer (Behind the Shades) and discographer (Revolution in the Air). Indeed, a Renaissance man in his own right, Heylin applies his encyclopedic mental database of the ways and means of bootlegging with a scholarly but entirely unstuffy zeal, revealing in the bargain commonsensical answers to the questions the sonnets have provoked for centuries: Who was Thomas Thorpe? “Mr. W. H.?” The “Onlie Begetter?” The “Fair Youth” and the “Dark Lady”? What hand did Shakespeare actually play in his sonnets’ arrangement and publication?

In Renaissance showbiz, as in today’s music business, most monies accrued to the publishers, not the artists themselves. Shakespeare, an astute businessman, owned part of the Globe Theatre and its productions, and as a result, by 1609, when the Sonnets appeared, he was the most successful playwright in London. While he couldn’t prevent pirated editions of his work—the “bad quartos,” for example—evidence points to Shakespeare’s enabling such piracy in the case of the Sonnets, a crux that Bardists have long sought to solve with interpretations of their notoriously baffling preface. (Heylin believes it was written by Thorpe, a man whose ambitions, if not talents, rivaled Shakespeare’s.)

Every imaginable (for me) question raised by every subsequent edition of the Sonnets is taken on by Heylin, and answered with passion and substance. What finer anniversary present could their author have asked, except, of course, the fulfillment of his wish that they be read—even misread—“so long as men can breathe?” Heylin makes a successful case that Shakespeare knew what the world’s reply would be even as he dipped his quill.

Diann Blakely has been short-listed for the Georgia Author of the Year Award for her most recent collection of poems, Cities of Flesh and the Dead (Elixir Press).

Arts & Culture, Literature, Nonfiction, Pop Culture

Nonfiction Pop Culture Literature Arts & Culture

The dawn of the Renaissance

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Browsing through a sale bin in search of summer reading, Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World) happened upon a paperback with an extremely odd and erotic cover. Intrigued, he bought a copy of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) for 10 cents. Through the random discovery of this poem, Greenblatt recognized a worldview that mirrored his own, for the ancient poet wrote that humans should accept that we and all the things we encounter are transitory, and we should embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world.

In The Swerve, Greenblatt elegantly chronicles the history of discovery that brought Lucretius’ poem out of the musty shadows of obscurity into an early modern world ripe for his ideas. At the center of this marvelous tale stands an avid book hunter, skilled manuscript copyist and notary: Poggio Bracciolini. While Poggio’s adventures in book hunting had not turned up much of value for several years, one day in 1417 changed his life and the world forever. He pulled down a dusty copy of On the Nature of Things from its hidden place on a monastery shelf, knew what he had found and ordered his assistant to copy it. The manuscript of Lucretius’ poem had languished in the monastery for over 500 years; the monks ignored it because of its lack of religious value. In Poggio’s act of discovery, he became a midwife to modernity.

With his characteristic breathtaking prose, Greenblatt leads us on an amazing journey through a time when the world swerved in a new direction. The culture that best epitomized Lucretius’ embrace of beauty and pleasure was the Renaissance. Greenblatt illustrates the ways that this Lucretian philosophy—which extends to death and life, dissolution as well as creation—characterizes ideas as varied as Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes’ chronicle of his mad knight and Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ’s feet. This captivating and utterly delightful narrative introduces us to the diverse nature of the Renaissance—from the history of bookmaking to the conflict between religion and science—and compels us to run out and read Lucretius’ poem.

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Staying in character

Review by bookpagedev

by Ron Wynn

While no less a celebrated figure than W.C. Fields often touted the versatility and talent of Bert Williams, the first black performer to appear on Broadway, Camille F. Forbes’ thorough and captivating biography Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt-Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star represents the most exhaustive work done on this groundbreaking figure. Williams was a superb entertainer, marvelous storyteller, impressive vocalist and often imaginative performer, yet he worked in an era when blacks were openly lampooned and ridiculed in hideous minstrel shows and blackface routines that depicted them as unthinking, childlike buffoons and caricatures. Despite this, Williams managed to inject a degree of humanity and dignity in even the worst creative situations.

Forbes carefully follows Williams’ rise to stardom and traces his involvement and participation in almost every phase of American entertainment. With access to everything from joke books to interviews, letters, films, songs and reviews (both positive and unflattering), Forbes not only tracks the evolution of Williams’ career, she shows the toll it took on him, especially the rejection he received from fellow African Americans angered by his frequent use of blackface. Williams was a complex, driven and conflicted soul, skilled enough to have successfully operated in every arena from medicine shows and vaudeville to films, musical theater and early recordings, yet today he’s more an object of pity or scorn than triumph. Introducing Bert Williams provides some much needed perspective and documentation regarding his life and times.

While no less a celebrated figure than W.C. Fields often touted the versatility and talent of Bert Williams, the first black performer to appear on Broadway, Camille F. Forbes' thorough and captivating biography Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt-Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First…

Arts & Culture, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Arts & Culture

For all of humankind

Review by John T. Slania

by John T. Slania

He had me at “Shazam!” Grant Morrison, the comic book writer and author of Supergods, rubbed the magic lantern of my memories and re-ignited my lifelong love affair with comic books. He helped me recall being a young boy and placing a dime and two pennies into a vending machine to fetch the latest issue of Superman. And the times as a college student, rummaging through cardboard boxes at a used comic book store to find old editions of Batman and the Fantastic Four. More recently, thanks to reading Supergods, I’ve invited my 12-year-old son to join me in paging through the 300-plus yellowing comic books I have stored in the basement.

Like me, Morrison is a comic book aficionado, and his passion for comic superheroes bursts through the pages of his book, subtitled “What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human.” Supergods is an examination of the evolution of superheroes and how they symbolize the changes in our culture, and it begins, appropriately, with the debut of Superman in 1938, a time when people were longing for a hero who could fight the forces of evil bent on world domination. On the two-dimensional pages, the criminals were Brainiac and Lex Luthor, but in real life, the villain was Adolf Hitler. In the turbulent 1960s, the superheroes developed an anti-authority edge, as seen in the popularity of Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk. By the 1980s, as society settled into a great malaise, the comics turned darker, typified by the rise of anti-heroes like the X-Men and Watchmen.

But Supergods doesn’t just offer us a reflection of ourselves throughout our recent history; it tackles important social issues such as feminism, illustrated in the comic book form of Wonder Woman and the Invisible Girl, and diversity in the guise of Black Panther and Storm. Morrison also notes with insight and irony how comic books, once considered subversive to youth, are now a reliable source of income for Hollywood.

Supergods is an enjoyable read for both rabid comic book fans who want to take a trip down memory lane and casual readers who want to understand how these colorful, sometimes crude books offer us a glimpse at how far we’ve come as a society. In Morrison’s words, comic books “tell us where we’ve been, what we feared and what we desired, and . . . speak to us about what we could be.”

Arts & Culture, Literature, Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir Literature Arts & Culture

Reading all day

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When her sister Anne-Marie died after a brief but debilitating illness, Nina Sankovitch took refuge in her old purple chair, surrounded by stacks of books that both she and her sister loved. Much as Joan Didion launched into her “year of magical thinking” following the death of her husband, Sankovitch launched into a year of magical reading as her own suspension in time between the overwhelming sorrow of her sister’s death and the future that awaited her.

Knowing how easy it would be to lose herself and her grief in the many busy little things that make up everyday life, Sankovitch allowed herself a year not to run, worry, control or make money. As she turned 46 (the age at which her sister died), she and her husband raised a toast to the commencement of her year of reading books—one book every day. “All the books would have been the ones I would have shared with Anne-Marie if I could have,” she writes.

Sankovitch inaugurated a website, ReadAllDay.org, where she reflected daily on the book she had just read. Seeking to bask in the memories of her sister’s life, to fill the void left by her death and to share her highs and lows with other readers, she feasted upon a banquet of books that ranged from Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants to Ross MacDonald’s The Ferguson Affair and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, devouring themes from love and death, to war and peace, to loss and hope.

In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, her affectionate and inspiring paean to the power of books and reading, Sankovitch gracefully acknowledges that her year of reading was an escape into the healing sanctuary of books, where she learned how to move beyond recuperation to living.

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Behind a childhood classic

Review by Catherine Hollis

by Catherine Hollis

Before Harry Potter came along, Charlotte’s Web was the best-selling children’s book in America. Generations of kids found real magic in Zuckerman’s barn, through young Fern’s relationship with Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider. Charlotte’s Web set its talking animals alongside realistic lessons about the cycles of life and death in the barnyard, a naturalism that emerged from author E.B. White’s own farm in Maine and his lifelong fascination with animals.

The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Michael Sims’ slice-of-life biography of E.B. White, focuses on those elements that directly contributed to the creation of Charlotte’s Web. The first section of the book is stunning, an almost novelistic recreation of the child Elwyn’s imaginative world. The youngest of seven children, Elwyn was shy and anxious, happiest when rambling alone in Maine’s lake country or watching chicks hatch in a barn. He was equally drawn to reading and writing about the natural world, becoming a published author at age nine with a poem entitled “To a Mouse.” Sims shows us how Elwyn’s childhood reading, from the animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton to Don Marquis’ comic verses about Archy and Mehitabel, influenced the writer White would become.

Sims’ imaginative re-enactment of pivotal scenes in White’s life is unconventional yet compelling. A wonderful example of this occurs when 26-year-old Andy (as White was known after college) peruses a magazine stand in Grand Central Station in 1925: Sims vividly details the covers of Film Fun and Time magazine before focusing his lens on Andy’s life-changing purchase of the first issue of The New Yorker. The staging of this scene helps Sims build out the literary and cultural contexts in which Andy becomes a professional writer, grounding the drama in solid historical research.

The adult Andy—successful New Yorker writer, married to editor Katharine White, dividing his time between Manhattan and a farm in Maine—is perhaps not so intriguing as the child Elwyn, until he becomes fascinated with orb weaver spiders, spending two years obsessively studying their habits in preparation for the creation of Charlotte A. Calvatica. Sims deftly handles the writing and publication of Charlotte’s Web, building thumbnail portraits of the legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom and illustrator Garth Williams. But this biography is at its best in the barnyard, illuminating that “sacred space” E.B. White brought to life in his beloved children’s book.

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Growing up with Judy Blume

Review by bookpagedev

by Deborah Hopkinson

It would be hard to find an American girl who hasn’t read a book by Judy Blume. More than 75 million copies of her books have been sold, and her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. The enduring popularity of books like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Blubber and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is due in part to her ability to deal with real issues and feelings in the lives of children and teens, including racial prejudice, menstruation, divorce and masturbation.

According to the American Library Association, five of Blume’s books are on the list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books. But that hasn’t stopped generations of kids from embracing them, something that’s immediately apparent in this new book of personal essays by 24 notable women writers, Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume. Edited by Jennifer O’Connell, the book includes contributions from well-known authors for children, teens and adults, including Meg Cabot, Megan McCafferty, Cara Lockwood, Melissa Senate and Julie Kenner.

From recalling teen angst over breast size, to the realization that one’s parents like Karen’s in It’s Not the End of the World are headed for divorce, to taking comfort from a Blume character during a life-threatening illness, the writers in this volume share a myriad of funny, bittersweet and heartfelt Judy Blume moments. Teens and adult fans of Blume will love this tribute to this unique American author and might even be inspired to write their own memories of how Judy Blume’s magic helped them navigate the often rocky road to adulthood.

It would be hard to find an American girl who hasn't read a book by Judy Blume. More than 75 million copies of her books have been sold, and her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. The enduring popularity of books…

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The subterfuge of a bestseller

The San Francisco literary revolution

A slice of 20th century life in literature

Henry’s journey to Walden Pond

Brief encounters with flesh-and-blood writers

Lessons from treasured books

Shakespeare, he’s in the alley

The dawn of the Renaissance

Staying in character

For all of humankind

Reading all day

Behind a childhood classic

Growing up with Judy Blume

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