Second Glance: “Darkly Luminous”: D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love
/The working title of D. H. Lawrence's Women In Love was Dies Irae - Day of Wrath. But reading it will make you feel not despairing but vibrantly alive.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Fatal Beauty
/Nothing shakes up the literary establishment like women writers -- or women readers -- who won't stay quietly in their place.
Read MoreSecond Glance: For Eternity
/John Bunyan's book-length religious allegory Pilgrim's Progress strikes many of today's readers as hopelessly hokey and tone-deaf - but it still has abundant power to change lives, as one passionate reader attests.
Read MoreBeethoven in the Soul
/Over time, the books of our youth make way for titles better suited to the grown-up readers we have become. But not all of them: YA or not, some books -- such as K. M. Peyton's Pennington trilogy -- deserve a lasting place on our shelves.
Read MoreSecond Glance: No Lesser Crime
/“The Moonstone will have its vengeance on you and yours!” Those fateful words propel us into one of the first and best of modern English detective novels -- still sensational after all these years.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Jane Collier’s Burn Book
/Long before Hairpin and Jezebel, Jane Collier, under the influence of Jonathan Swift, was savagely satirizing women's ettiquette guides in her work An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. Chris R. Morgan revisits the caustic classic.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Uncomfortable Chivalry of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe
/You think you know Ivanhoe: it's the original swash-buckling adventure story, full of fights, escapes, ambushes, and then, of course, a happy ending. But what you see if you look more closely may make you think twice about its chivalric ideals.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Seth Morgan and the Kamikaze Novel
/With its headspinning wordplay and lunatic cast of characters, Seth Morgan's 1990 novel Homeboy blazed like a comet into the literary pantheon. Steve Danziger revisits this grime crime classic.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Against the Wind
/It's one of the iconic bestsellers of the 20th century, an epic of love and war -- but how well does "Gone With The Wind" hold up, as a book? A personal journey through a problematic classic.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Morality of Vanity Fair: It’s All About You
/Thackeray's seminal big baggy monster of a novel is a satiric romp across all levels of English society - and every bit as enjoyable now as it was when it was the talk of London in 1847
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