Through essays contributed by modern thriller writers such as David Baldacci, Lee Child, Sandra Brown, and many others, this book explores 100 works of suspense from the ancient world to modern times.

'The novel: a survival skill' offers a completely new account of the relationship between writer, text, and reader. Drawing on ideas from systemic psychology and positioning theory, Parks suggests that both the content and style of a novelist's work, the kind of stories told, and the way in which they are told, form part of a more general strategy of suvival that the novelist has developed in reaponse to tensions within his or her family of origin....

Angels and Wild Things examines the unique contribution of Maurice Sendak to the literature of childhood. It is the first comprehensive reading of Sendak's key works that considers the symbolic child who has appeared and developed in Sendak's books and remains at the center of his vision. By fusing biographical, historical, cultural, and literary materials with the insights of depth psychology and archetypal theory, this study traces the evolution...

Wendy W. Fairey grew up among books. Her mother, the famous Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham, was F. Scott Fitzgerald's last love -- he died in her living room in 1940. As part of a 'College of One' education, Fitzgerald would bring Graham literary classics from Charles Dickens to William Thackeray, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. The protagonists of these books later became Fairey's intimates. Leaving her glamorous Hollywood world as a young girl,...