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Jane Austen in Scarsdale
or Love, Death, and the SATS
What would a latter-day Jane Austen say about love, death, and the SATs? Anne Ehrlich is a dedicated guidance counselor steering her high school charges through the perils of college admission. Years ago, when she was graduating from Columbia, her wealthy family persuaded her to give up the love of her life, Ben Cutler, a poor boy from Brooklyn College. Anne has never married and hasn't seen Ben for 13 years-until his nephew turns up in her high school and starts applying to college. Can old love be rekindled, or are past mistakes too painful to forget?
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“Jane Austen in Scarsdale by Paula Marantz Cohen. Inspired by Austen's Persuasion, Chohen's tale focuses on a high-school administrator confronted by a love she once rejected. Smart and funny, it's a gem."
—People Magazine
“Paula Marantz Cohen has done it again! Jane Austen in Scarsdale is laugh-out-loud funny, literate, wise—and best of all, a satirical mirror of our times. She has become our own Jane Austen.”
—Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education and author of The Language Police
“Unabashedly entertaining reading…touching and not a little wise. Written with intelligent wit and a piercingly perceptive view of the crazy college-admission scramble, Jane Austen in Scarsdale is exactly what good light fiction should be. A Compelling story well told, regardless of the century.”
–Tanya Barrientos -- The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Cohen has hit a bull’s-eye in describing the lengths to which parents (and sometimes students) will go to gain entry to the best colleges, where applicants often have only a 10 percent chance of being admitted as freshmen."
–– Education Next
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Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan
Carla Goodman is worried. Her husband, a gastroenterologist in private practice, is coming home frazzled because medicine isn't what it used to be. Her son's teachers want to put him on Ritalin to stop him from wreaking havoc on the fifth grade. And her cranky twelve-year-old daughter has a bas mitzvah coming up.
But it's Carla's sweet, widowed mother, Jessie Kaplan, who really has her baffled. Jessie has suddenly "remembered" that she was Shakespeare's girlfriend---the Dark Lady of the sonnets---in a previous life. Can even the famed Dr. Leonard Samuels, psychiatrist and author of the self-help book, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love My Mother-in-Law, help with problems like these?
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Though Cohen's knack for gentle satire earns some terrific laughs, this buoyant novel's power stems from the author's deep sympathy for her conventional characters. She mocks', yes, but from a place of tremendous understanding.
-- Newsday
“A brightly comic book…[that explores] the redemptive capacity of the literary imagination…Highly literate light fiction.”
-- Times Literary Supplement
“A comic tour-de-force…as fresh and pungent as an apple cake [that] proves that literary fiction doesn’t have to be elegiac in tone to be successful.”
-- The Hudson Review
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Jane Austen in Boca
Eligible men are scarce in Boca. When good-hearted meddler Carol Newman learns that the wealthy and personable Norman Grafstein has lost his wife, she resolves to marry him off to her lonely mother-in-law, May. Even May's sharp-tongued friend Flo approves of Norman--although Norman's best friend Stan, a cynical professor, keeps getting under Flo's skin.
Will May and Norman eventually find happiness? Will Flo succumb to the charms of the suavely cosmopolitan Mel Shirmer? Misunderstandings abound until love conquers both pride and prejudice in this perceptive, engaging comedy of manners.
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“Utterly charming…think Pride and Prejudice, but with better weather.”
-- Vanity Fair
“Page-turner of the week… Austen never schmoozed by the pool with a pack of bronzed yentas, but her Pride plot proves as durable as ever…in this witty romp.”
-- People Magazine
“Clever, warmhearted…Cohen’s wit is sharp, smart, and satirical, and her characterizations are vividly on target.”
--The San Francisco Chronicle
“While the novel works as a clever remake of Pride and Prejudice, it has equal merit as contemporary social commentary.”
-- Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal
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Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth
Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth is a broad cultural study that connects the rise of film to the rise of America as a cultural center and world power in the twentieth century. Cohen argues that through the medium of silent film, America was able to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe, assert its cultural independence, and forge a unique form of cultural expression.
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"Much of [Cohen's] stimulating book deals with a conjunction in American history, the arrival of film around 1900 just at the right time for a vibrant national mythology to find its perfect medium.... [She] posits a strong case for a marriage made in historical heaven between this mythology and film."
--Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic
"Why as American pop culture become so dominant? One intriguing [explanation] is given [here.] Cohen...shows that the development of the silent film 'sustained the American myth and sold it to the world.'"
--Edward Rothstein, New York Times
"Cohen's seamless integration of seemingly disparate facts is refreshing and convincing.... A thoughtful, engaging [exploration] of the American myth of self-creation."
--Library Journal
"Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth is the most accessible account I know of the aesthetic and historical ramifications of this most remarkable of art forms. Beautifully written and imaginatively conceived, it provides a powerful introduction to the form for those who have never thought seriously about silent films and offers a splendid evocation of their power for those who already know and love them."
--Jonathan Freedman, coeditor of Hitchcock's America
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The Daughter as Reader: Encounters Between Literature and Life
The Daughter as Reader brings together personal narrative and literary criticism to celebrate the ways in which books enrich and shape our lives.
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Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism
This provocative study traces Alfred Hitchcock's long directorial career from Victorianism to postmodernism. Drawing on a number of methodologies including feminism, psychoanalysis, and family systems, the author provides an insightful look at the paradox of a Victorian era.
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The Daughter's Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel
An interdisciplinary investigation into the daughter's role in 19th-century families and their fictional representations.
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