Dec 7
2004
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the very few "important" mid-to-late 20th century writers whose books are not, actually, complete downers. That's not to say that his books don't have their emotionally se...
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Nov 29
2004
Charlaine Harris is the writer of the Aurora Teagarden and Lily Bard mysteries, as well as the extremely successful Sookie Stackhouse supernatural romance/suspense series, about a telepathic barma...
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Nov 29
2004
Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were a pair of 19th century German scholars who began collecting ancient German folktales as a way of researching the philological aspects of law. Naturally, I ha...
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Nov 29
2004
Relying on the Disney versions of Cinderella, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast to give you a sense of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales is about as effective as trying to pass a mythology class...
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Nov 29
2004
Philip K. Dick was a pretty messed up guy- he was married multiple times, struggled with poorly diagnosed mental illness for much of his life, and never approached the success of fellow writers Fr...
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Nov 29
2004
Where did Cynthia Heimel go, anyway? She disappeared after the release of her 2002 book, Advanced Sex Tips for Girls: This Time It’s Personal (that would be the one with the cover featuring a wom...
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Nov 29
2004
Rumiko Takahashi is the creator of four long-running, influential, and insanely entertaining manga series--Urusei Yatsura, Ranma ½, Maison Ikkoku, and InuYasha Sengoku o Togi Zoshi--as well as a h...
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Nov 16
2004
Nora Roberts’s Blue Dahlia reads like a mix’n’match of about fifty of her previous books. As such, it’s a perfect introduction to her work--like most of Roberts’s books, Blue Dahlia is an enterta...
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Nov 14
2004
The lust, angst, and violence quotient in Kelley Armstrong's stories of werewolves and witches is perfectly balanced between Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate and Laurell K. Hamilton's A...
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Nov 14
2004
Susan Juby is the author of Alice, I Think and its sequel, Miss Smithers, a hilarious and deeply bizarre series of teen books about a young Canadian misanthrope with ten less-than-successful years...
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Nov 14
2004
With cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, all roads seem to lead back to Bloom County. As the writer and illustrator of Bloom County, Outland, and now Opus, as well as a handful of children's books, alm...
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Nov 13
2004
Compared with fellow Black Mask writers Cornell Woolrich and Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler was a man with a successful career, a working set of social skills, and a downright chatty (one migh...
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Nov 13
2004
Alfred Hitchcock must have taken one look at the Cornell Woolrich's stories and gotten those little cartoon dollar signs in his eyes. Between 1954 and 1958 he turned Woolrich's nail-biting short ...
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Nov 4
2004
When Leonard Wibberley's The Mouse That Roared first appeared as a serialized story in the 1950s, I'm sure the idea of the United States being invaded by a tiny nation armed with ridiculously inadequate weapons was just too precious. Unfortunately, in a post-9/11, box-cutter-filled world, some of the central jokes in this story hit pretty close to home...
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Nov 3
2004
The English-American writer Frances Hodgson Burnett actually has two claims to Wordcandy fame. Not only did she write two classic YA novels, but one of the aforementioned classic novels (1909's A...
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Nov 3
2004
As you could probably guess from the titles of her stories (Savannah Blues, Little Bitty Lies, and Hissy Fit), Mary Kay Andrews is a very Southern writer. Her intelligent, entertaining books are ...
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Nov 3
2004
According to the Internet, novelist Dorothy Gilman's real last name is "Butters". Now, while I can see that "Dorothy Butters" may not scream "hardboiled suspense writer", I think that it is the p...
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Nov 3
2004
Terry Pratchett is like God's gift to fantasy fans. Some of his books might blend a bit together, but Pratchett is witty (capable of making puns funny--it's true! Yes, it can be done!) and he ca...
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Oct 17
2004
The Baroness Orczy's 1905 novel The Scarlet Pimpernel is pure, unadulterated wordcandy. It's like the literary equivalent of Scharffen Berger chocolate. This book is gorgeously written, perfectly...
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Oct 17
2004
Monica Hughes, arguably the first Canadian writer of YA science fiction, published close to 35 books, many of which focus on the delicate balance between humans, scientific progress, and nature. ...
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Oct 17
2004
Jasper Fforde is the author of a series of dazzlingly silly and imaginative alternate universe/adventure/detective stories, including The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, ...
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Oct 17
2004
C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia are Wordcandy classics, and I am afraid that yes, you do have to read them. If you read them as a kid, it was probably pretty easy to just ignore all the anvil-s...
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Oct 16
2004
The character of Timothy Hunter--the original black-haired, bespectacled British boy wizard--was introduced in a Neil Gaiman-penned miniseries in 1990, and DC's Vertigo Comics has trotted him out ...
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Oct 7
2004
The Hungarian-born novelist Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Orczy is best known as the Baroness Orczy, the author of the Wordcandy classic The Scarlet Pimpernel. Orczy began her career as an ...
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Oct 7
2004
T. H. White is the author of 1958's The Once and Future King, a "novel" (actually a collection of four of his earlier books) that begins with the education of the young King Arthur and ends with h...
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Sep 25
2004
If you took any good caper movie, turned it into a book, added a boatload of tongue-in-cheek licentiousness, and stuck the whole thing in a plummy P.G. Wodehouse-style setting, you’d still en...
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Sep 23
2004
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is an extraordinary book, but Bloomsbury’s attempt to market it as “Harry Potter for grown-ups” is misleading. Clarke’s ten-years-in-the-making debut novel is a witty, wildly imaginative book that’s certain to knock the socks off any English Lit major...
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Sep 16
2004
If your only experience with Charles Dickens's books is reading A Tale of Two Cities for your high school literature class, you aren't doing him justice. I am sorry to say that after that truly e...
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Aug 19
2004
Madeleine E. Robins tried writing several different types of genre fiction--romances, sci-fi stories, comic books--before hitting literary paydirt with 2003's Point of Honour. This mystery series...
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Aug 19
2004
Short, sweet, and witty, Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs was the 1912 equivalent of Meg Cabot's Princess Diaries books. Webster's heroine, 18-year-old orphan Judy Abbott, is stunned to discover t...
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