Acclaimed scholar Marilyn Yalom distills the central tenets of the Gallic gospel of love from her reading of the great French literary works, as well as from the people she has known and her own memories of France, examining almost a thousand years of divine culture in search of the intimate moments that reveal how the particularly French concept of l'amour has endured and evolved.

"When it came to understanding love, a teenage Jillian Keenan had nothing to guide her--until a production of The Tempest sent Shakespeare's language flowing through her blood for the first time. In Sex with Shakespeare, she tells the story of how the Bard's plays helped her embrace her unusual sexual identity and find a love story of her own."--

Published in 1956, Peyton Place became a bestseller and a literary phenomenon. A lurid and gripping story of murder, incest, female desire, and social injustice, it was consumed as avidly by readers as it was condemned by critics and the clergy. Its author, Grace Metalious, a housewife who grew up in poverty in a New Hampshire mill town and had aspired to be a writer from childhood, loosely based the novel's setting, characters, and incidents on real-life...