The Strange Death Of Mistress Coffin

New England. 1648. The Piscataqua Settlement. A young woman has been found dead, her violated body stripped naked and thrown in a river. Her husband, a reclusive and learned man, has mysteriously halted his legal proceedings against the most likely suspect, who has disappeared into the wilderness. The settlement's elders call on a young Englishman, Richard Browne, to discover the truth about what happened. But the more he learns, the more puzzling the crime becomes, and the more he finds himself drawn to the wife of the missing suspect. Based on an actual unsolved murder from the records of colonial America, Robert J. Begiebing's The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin is at once a spellbinding mystery and a fascinating evocation of life in early America.

For six decades, writer and editor Robert A. Parker has followed up each book he reads, mainly novels, with an evaluation. His comments are informed by an independent critical view that balances a moral and literary sensibility. In this first of six volumes, the authors covered range from Kobo Abe to Michael Cunningham. They include Richard Adams, Russell Banks, Anthony Burgess, A.S. Byatt, James Carroll, Willa Cather, J. M. Coetzee, and Joseph Conrad. The commentaries are listed alphabetically by author, and the books by the date of publication for each author. Some authors are represented by one book, some by five or more. Future volumes will cover additional authors alphabetically. The writers here represent a broad range of writing styles, cultural influences, and moral philosophies. And all are rated on their literary achievement, the effectiveness of plot, character, and setting, plus their recognition of the moral, ethical, and spiritual values of mankind.

A picaresque novel of the remarkable life of a liberated 19th-century woman.

This publication will fill a gap in the bibliographic reference shelf by identifying historical novels for both adult and young adult readers. ^IAmerican Historical Fiction^R contains over 3,000 titles set in states and historical regions of the United States. Entries are organized by time period. The newest titles, as well as old favorites, are covered. The volume is indexed by author, title, genre, subject, and geographic setting.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents). As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.

Presents extended reviews of noteworthy books, short reviews, essays and articles on topics and trends in publishing, literature, culture and the arts. Includes lists of best sellers (hardcover and paperback).