Spring Moon
Bette Bao Lord, 1981
HarperCollins
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060599751

Summary
At a time of mystery and cruelty...in an ancient land of breathtaking beauty and exotic surprise...a courageous woman triumphs over her world's ultimate tragedy.

Behind the garden walls of the House of Chang, pampered daughter Spring Moon is born into luxury and privilege. But the tempests of change sweep her into a new world—one of hardship, turmoil, and heartbreak, one that threatens to destroy her husband, her family, and her darkest secret love.

Through a tumultuous lifetime, Spring Moon must cling to her honor, to the memory of a time gone by, and to a destiny, foretold at her birth, that has yet to be fulfilled. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—November 3, 1938
• Where—Shanghai, China
• Education—B.A., Tufts University; M.A., Fletcher School of
   Law and Diplomacy (at Tufts)
• Awards—Award of Excellence from The International Center
   in New York
• Currently—N/A

She was born in Shanghai, China with her mother and father Dora and Sandys Bao and came to the United States at the age of eight when her father, a British-trained engineer, was sent there in 1946 by the Chinese government to purchase equipment. In 1947 Bao Lord and her family were stranded in the United States when Mao Zedong and his communist rebels won the civil war in China.

Bao Lord has written eloquently about her painful childhood experiences as a Chinese immigrant in the post-World War II United States in her autobiographical children's book In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. In this book she describes her struggle to learn English and to become accepted by her classmates.

Today, Bao Lord is a distinguished novelist and writer, and serves as chair of the Board of Trustees of Freedom House.

President Clinton has hailed Ms. Bao Lord as "someone who writes so powerfully about the past and is working so effectively to shape the future." Her First novel, Spring Moon (1981), set in pre-revolutionary China, was an international bestseller and American Book Award nominee for best first novel. The Middle Heart (1996), Bao Lord's second novel, spans 70 years of modern Chinese history, ending in 1989 with the student-led demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

Bao Lord graduated with her BA from Tufts University and received an MA from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She married Winston Lord, later an Ambassador to China, in 1963. They have a daughter and son.

Ms. Bao Lord is a recipient of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
An excellent novel.
Wall Street Journal

The interwoven fates of five generation...Murder, passion, betrayal, incest and intrigue...and the conflict of generations.
Boston Globe

A Chinese Gone With The Wind.
Publishers Weekly

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Discussion Questions
1. At the beginning of the novel, Spring Moon's happy existence is thrown into turmoil because of the family's plan for her servant, Plum Blossom. Her young uncle, Noble Talent, explains: "Plum Blossom is not yours ... [S]he belongs to the House of Chang." How do honor and duty factor into family decision making in the House of Chang?

2. How does the death of Old Venerable affect Bold Talent's life and responsibilities? How is Bold Talent received upon his untimely return to Soochow? What steps does he take to shed the Western manners and behaviors and reacquaint himself with Chinese traditions and customs?

3. How would you characterize the initial relationship between Spring Moon and her uncle, Bold Talent? What elements of Spring Moon's character does Bold Talent admire? Why does he agree to teach SpringMoon how to read and write? How does the House of Chang react to Bold Talent's decision to educate Spring Moon?

4. What aspects of China's political life cause unrest between Bold Talent and Noble Talent? How does Noble Talent feel about China's entering into agreements that weaken its power as a nation? When Soochow becomes a treaty port, how does Bold Talent react to protect China's interests?

5. Spring Moon's reaction to the news of her arranged marriage with Pan Tai Tai's son? Why does she go to Bold Talent and reveal the news of her marriage to him? Were you surprised by Bold Talent's willingness to intervene to rescue Spring Moon? Why does the Matriarch encourage him to find a husband for Spring Moon? Were you at all surprised by his choice of a husband? Why does Spring Moon feign grief at the news of her newly arranged marriage to Glad Promise?

6. Describe Spring Moon's mode of travel on her ten-day journey from Soochow to Peking. What does her treatment as a new bride suggest about the roles and opportunities of upper-class women in China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? How does Spring Moon and Glad Promise's wedding night defy tradition?

7. Discuss the significance of ancestors and filial obligation in Spring Moon. How important are ancestors and ancestor worship in this novel? How is the role of ancestors evident in rites of passage like births, betrothals, New Year's celebrations, weddings, and deaths?

8. What motivates Glad Promise to return to Peking and leave his pregnant wife? Why does Spring Moon decide not to bind Lustrous Jade's feet? How does the Woo clan treat her and her daughter after Glad Promise's departure?

9. What changes does Spring Moon find in Soochow when she returns with Lustrous Jade from Peking? How is she received by her family? How would you describe Bold Talent's marriage to Golden Virtue? How does Spring Moon's return affect that relationship? Discuss the implications of Spring Moon's decision to conceal her pregnancy and the birth and adoption of Enduring Promise from Bold Talent and his wife.

10. How does Lustrous Jade's awakening to Christianity and Communism affect her relationship with Spring Moon? How do Lustrous Jade and Resolute Spirit get entangled in affairs with Noble Talent? Discuss how Lustrous Jade's political fervor differs from that of her granduncle.

11. What elements of Chinese history did you find most compelling as they played out in the chronicle of the House of Chang? What aspects of Spring Moon's experience resonated most for you as a reader?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Beatrice and Virgil
Yann Martel, 2010
Random House
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400069262


Summary
Fate takes many forms.

When Henry receives a letter from an elderly taxidermist, it poses a puzzle that he cannot resist. As he is pulled further into the world of this strange and calculating man, Henry becomes increasingly involved with the lives of a donkey and a howler monkey—named Beatrice and Virgil—and the epic journey they undertake together.

With all the spirit and originality that made Life of Pi so beloved, this brilliant new novel takes the reader on a haunting odyssey. On the way Martel asks profound questions about life and art, truth and deception, responsibility and complicity. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—June 25, 1963
• Where—Salamanca, Spain
• Education—B.A., Trent University, Ontario
• Awards—Booker Prize, 2002; Hugh MacLennan Prize, 
   Quebec Writers’ Federation
• Currently—Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 of peripatetic Canadian parents. He grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario and Mexico, and has continued travelling as an adult, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India. Martel refers to his travels as, “seeing the same play on a whole lot of different stages.”

After studying philosophy at Trent University and while doing various odd jobs—tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard—he began to write. In addition to Life of Pi, Martel is the prize-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a collection of short stories, and of Self, a novel, both published internationally. Yann has been living from his writing since the age of 27. He divides his time between yoga, writing and volunteering in a palliative care unit. Yann Martel lives in Montreal.

More
Sometime in the early 1990s, Yann Martel stumbled across a critique in the New York Times Review of Books by John Updike that captured his curiosity. Although Updike's response to Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats was fairly icy and indifferent, the premise immediately intrigued Martel. According to Martel, Max and the Cats was, "as far as I can remember...about a zoo in Berlin run by a Jewish family. The year is 1933 and, not surprisingly, business is bad. The family decides to emigrate to Brazil. Alas, the ship sinks and one lone Jew ends up in a lifeboat with a black panther." Whether or not the story was as uninspiring as Updike had indicated in his review, Martel was both fascinated by this premise and frustrated that he had not come up with it himself.

Ironically, Martel's account of the plot of Max and the Cats wasn't completely accurate. In fact, in Scliar's novel, Max Schmidt did not belong to a family of zookeepers—he was the son of furrier. Furthermore, he did not emigrate from Berlin to Brazil with his family as the result of a failing zoo, but was forced to flee Hamburg after his lover's husband sells him out to the Nazi secret police. So, this plot that so enthralled Martel—which he did not pursue for several years because he assumed Moacyr Scliar had already tackled it—was more his own than he had thought.

Meanwhile, Martel managed to write and publish two books: a collection of short stories titled The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios in 1993 and a novel about gender confusion called Self in 1996. Both books sold only moderately well, further frustrating the writer. In an effort to collect his thoughts and refresh his creativity, he took a trip to India, first spending time in bustling Bombay. However, the overcrowded city only furthered Martel's feelings of alienation and dissolution. He then decided to move on to Matheran, a section near Bombay but without that city's dense population. In this peaceful hill station overlooking the city, Martel began revisiting an idea he had not considered in some time, the premise he had unwittingly created when reading Updike's review in the New York Times Review of Books. He developed the idea even further away from Max and the Cats. While Scliar's novel was an extended holocaust allegory, Martel envisioned his story as a witty, whimsical, and mysterious meditation on zoology and theology. Unlike Max Schmidt, Pi Patel would, indeed, be the son of a zookeeper. Martel would, however, retain the shipwrecked-with-beasts theme from Max and the Cats. During an ocean exodus from India to Canada, the ship sinks and Pi finds himself stranded on a lifeboat with such unlikely shipmates as a zebra, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

The resulting novel, Life of Pi, became the smash-hit for which Martel had been longing. Selling well over a million copies and receiving the accolades of Book Magazine, Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal, and, yes, the New York Times Review of Books, Life of Pi has been published in over 40 countries and territories, in over 30 languages. It is currently in production by Fox Studios with a script by master-of-whimsy Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children; Amélie) and directorial duties to be handled by Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban).

Martel is now working on his third novel, a bizarrely allegorical adventure about a donkey and a monkey that travel through a fantastical world...on a shirt. Well, at least no one will ever accuse him of borrowing that premise from any other writer.

Extras
From a 2002 Barnes & Noble interview:

• Life of Pi is not Yann Martel's first work to be adapted for the screen. His short story "Manners of Dying" was made into a motion picture by fellow Canadian resident Jeremy Peter Allen in 2004.

• When he isn't penning modern masterpieces, Martel spends much of his time volunteering in a palliative care unit.

• When asked what book was most influential to his career as a writer, here's what he said: 

I would say Le Petit Chose, by the French writer Alphonse Daudet. It was the first book to make me cry. I was around ten years old. It made me see how powerful words could be, how much we could see and feel through mere black jottings on a page. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
Mr. Martel ’s new book, Beatrice and Virgil, unfortunately, is every bit as misconceived and offensive as his earlier book was fetching. It, too, features animals as central characters. It, too, involves a figure who in some respects resembles the author. It, too, is written in deceptively light, casual prose.... [H]is borrowings from...[Samuel] Beckett...serve no persuasive end. Rather they are another awkward element in this disappointing and often perverse novel.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Martel’s latest novel demonstrates the same gift for vivid description and wholehearted feeling, but it’s a lot more resistant to summary.... He appears to want to embrace difficulty while retaining all the readers who loved the easy narrative of Life of Pi. Although his ambition is admirable, the literary complexity and the simplicity of feeling Martel is aiming for don’t comfortably mesh. Beatrice and Virgil has its rewards, but the frustrations are what stick in the mind.
Robert Hanks - New York Times Book Review

Beatrice and Virgil is so dull, so misguided, so pretentious that only the prospect of those millions of "Pi" fans could secure the interest of major publishers and a multimillion-dollar advance. This short tale runs into trouble almost from its first precious page with an autobiographical portrait of the thinly disguised author.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

Dark but divine.... This novel might just be a masterpiece about the Holocaust.... Martel brilliantly guides the reader from the too-sunny beginning into the terrifying darkness of the old man's shop and Europe's past. Everything comes into focus by the end, leaving the reader startled, astonished, and moved.
USA Today

Brilliant...with this short, crisply written, many-layered book, Martel has once again demonstrated that nothing tells the truth like fiction.... Another philosophical winner.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

Those spell-bound by Man Booker prize-winning Life of Pi will find much to love in Yann Martel’s new work of fiction.... In Beatrice and Virgil, Martel again evokes the power of allegory, this time to address the legacy of the Holocaust—as well as the pleasure of fairy tales. At the heart of this novel are questions about truth and illusion, responsibility and innocence, and Martel is able to employ Beatrice and Virgil as sympathetic, nuanced vehicles for his vision. Beatrice and Virgil is a thought-provoking delight.
Marie Claire

If Beatrice and Virgil were a piece of music, it would be an extended fugue, beginning so quietly as to be almost inaudible, and culminating in a moment of overwhelming noise followed by silence....There is indeed no exit from Beatrice and Virgil, not even when the book culminates in its final moment of overwhelming crescendo, as Martel’s characters find themselves trapped in an eruption of hell-like flames. Like the echoing themes of a fugue, all the components of the Martel’s novel fit tightly together, leading up to one ultimate moment of terror.
Harvard Crimson

Megaselling Life of Pi author Martel addresses, in this clunky metanarrative, the violent legacy of the 20th century with an alter ego: Henry L'Hôte, an author with a very Martel-like CV who, after a massively successful first novel, gives up writing. Henry and his wife, Sarah, move to a big city (“Perhaps it was New York. Perhaps it was Paris. Perhaps it was Berlin”), where Henry finds satisfying work in a chocolatería and acting in an amateur theater troupe. All is well until he receives a package containing a short story by Flaubert and an excerpt from an unknown play. His curiosity about the sender leads him to a taxidermist named Henry who insists that Henry-the-author help him write a play about a monkey and a donkey. Henry-the-author is at first intrigued by sweet Beatrice, the donkey, and Virgil, her monkey companion, but the animals' increasing peril draws Henry into the taxidermist's brutally absurd world. Martel's aims are ambitious, but the prose is amateur and the characters thin, the coy self-referentiality grates, and the fable at the center of the novel is unbearably self-conscious. When Martel (rather energetically) tries to tug our heartstrings, we're likely to feel more manipulated than moved.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Martel’s mesmerizing Man Booker Prize–winning Life of Pi (2002) has become a cult classic, its richness of depth and meaning belying the startling basic story line of a young Indian man stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for 227 days. So it is with Martel’s latest novel, also a fable-type story with iceberg-deep dimensions reaching far below the surface of its general premise. —Brad Hooper
Booklist

Whimsy takes a deadly serious turn in a novel that will enchant some readers and exasperate others. The Canadian author's previous novel (Life of Pi, 2001) won the Man Booker Prize, became a critically lauded bestseller and made legions of fans eager for a follow-up. Here it is, a meta-fictional shell game about a novelist who has experienced the same sort of success as Martel by writing a similar sort of animal-filled book, who attempts a follow-up (about the Holocaust) that mixes fact and fiction in a manner that advance readers find unsatisfying and who thus stops writing. His story reads something like a fable, since for the longest time the protagonist has only one name, Henry, and he and his wife move to a city that remains unidentified, though the narrative suggests it could be one of many. Instead of writing, Henry becomes involved with a chocolate shop and a theater troupe, and then he receives a package from a reader. The most accommodating bestselling author ever, Henry answers all his mail and goes to great lengths to track down the sender of this package, which contains a short story by Flaubert, a play with two characters-the title characters of this novel-and a plea for help. Henry's quest leads him to a mysterious taxidermist, also named Henry, whose shop seems to contain "all of creation stuffed into one large room," and who plies his trade in homage to Flaubert-"to bear witness." Uh-oh, allegory alert! Like a Russian doll, the novel contains parables within parables, as the play's Beatrice and Virgil (from Dante, of course) turn out to be a donkey and a monkey, and their dialogue sounds like Aesop filtered through Samuel Beckett ("This road must lead somewhere"/ "Is it somewhere we want to be?"). Henry agrees to help with the play that has been the taxidermist's life's work, thus breaking the novelist's writer's block, though at a great price. As Henry asks Henry, "Symbolic of what?"
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. What is Beatrice & Virgil about?

2. Discuss the main characters. What are Henry and the taxidermist like? How are they different from one another, and in what ways are they similar? What are Beatrice and Virgil like?

3. What do you think of Henry’s original idea for his book? Do you agree with him that the Holocaust needs to be remembered in different ways, beyond the confines of “historical realism”? Why, or why not?

4. What is the importance of self-reflexivity in the novel? For example, does Henry remind you of Yann Martel? How does Beatrice & Virgil relate to the book that Henry wanted to publish originally? Who writes the story?

5. How would you compare Beatrice & Virgil to Life of Pi? How do Yann Martel’s aims in the two novels differ, and how does he go about achieving them?

6. Close to the start of the book, Henry (the writer) says, “A book is a part of speech. At the heart of mine is an incredibly upsetting event that can survive only in dialogue” (p. 12). Why would this be the case? How does it influence the form of the book we are reading?

7. Describe the role Flaubert’s story “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” plays in the novel.

8. Why doesn’t the waiter at the cafe address the taxidermist?

9. How do you explain Henry’s wife’s reaction to the taxidermist and his workshop?

10. How do you feel about the play A 20th-Century Shirt? Could it be performed? Does it remind you of anything? What role does it play in the book?

11. Who are Beatrice and Virgil in literature? Which other books and writers do you find influencing this one, and with what effects?

12. What moral challenges does Beatrice & Virgil present the reader with? What does it leave you thinking about?

13. What are the different kinds of theatre, acting and performance in Beatrice & Virgil and what do they add to the book?

14. What is the significance of names in the novel, especially Henry’s full name?

15. How is writing like or unlike taxidermy in the book?

16. What role do Erasmus and Mendelssohn play in the novel, and why does it matter?

17. What is your favourite part of Beatrice & Virgil?

18. How do the two parts of the book relate? How do they connect to Henry’s original plan for his book? Or, to put it another way: why “Games for Gustav”?

19. What do Henry’s non-literary activities—music lessons, waiting tables—tell us about him as a character? What else do they add to the book?

20. How is Henry changed by the events of the novel? How does this relate to Beatrice and Virgil having “no reason to change” (p. 151) over the course of their play?

21. Beatrice & Virgil stresses compound words, new words, overvalued words, words that are “cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field” (p. 88)—what are some of the key words in the book, and how are words important as a theme in the novel?

22. How do Henry and Henry help each other write?

23. What is the significance of 68 Nowolipki Street?

24. Does Beatrice & Virgil itself aim to “make the Holocaust portable” for modern memory? Does it succeed in doing so? How does the book’s ending change things?

25. What is the significance of the word “Aukitz” in the novel, and in the book design?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Girl in the Green Raincoat (Tess Monaghan series #11)
Laura Lippman, 2010
HarperCollins
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061938566


Summary
In the third trimester of her pregnancy, Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan is under doctor's orders to remain immobile. Bored and restless, reduced to watching the world go by outside her window, she takes small comfort in the mundane events she observes...like the young woman in a green raincoat who walks her dog at the same time every day.

Then one day the dog is running free and its owner is nowhere to be seen. Certain that something is terribly wrong, and incapable of leaving well enough alone, Tess is determined to get to the bottom of the dog walker's abrupt disappearance, even if she must do so from her own bedroom. But her inquisitiveness is about to fling open a dangerous Pandora's box of past crimes and troubling deaths...and she's not only putting her own life in jeopardy but also her unborn child's.

Previously serialized in the New York Times, and now published in book form for the very first time, The Girl in the Green Raincoat is a masterful Hitchcockian thriller from one of the very best in the business: multiple award-winner Laura Lippman. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—January 31, 1959
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.S., Northwestern University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Baltimore, Maryland


Lippman was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the daughter of Theo Lippman Jr., a well known and respected writer at the Baltimore Sun, and Madeline Lippman, a retired school librarian for the Baltimore City Public School System. She attended high school in Columbia, Maryland, where she was the captain of the Wilde Lake High School It's Academic team.

Lippman is a former reporter for the (now defunct) San Antonio Light and the Baltimore Sun. She is best known for writing a series of novels set in Baltimore and featuring Tess Monaghan, a reporter (like Lippman herself) turned private investigator.

Lippman's works have won the Agatha, Anthony, Edgar, Nero, Gumshoe and Shamus awards. Her 2007 release, What the Dead Know, was the first of her books to make the New York Times bestseller list, and was shortlisted for the Crime Writer's Association Dagger Award. In addition to the Tess Monaghan novels, Lippman wrote 2003's Every Secret Thing, which has been optioned for the movies by Academy Award–winning actor Frances McDormand.

Lippman lives in the South Baltimore neighborhood of Federal Hill and frequently writes in the neighborhood coffee shop Spoons. In addition to writing, she teaches at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. In January, 2007, she taught at the 3rd Annual Writers in Paradise at Eckerd College.

Lippman is married to David Simon, another former Baltimore Sun reporter, and creator and an executive producer of the HBO series The Wire. The character Bunk is shown to be reading one of her books in episode eight of the first season of The Wire. She appeared in a scene of the first episode of the last season of The Wire as a reporter working in the Baltimore Sun newsroom.

Awards
2015 Anthony Award-Best Novel (After I'm Gone)
2008 Anthony Award-Best Novel (What the Dead Know)
2008 Anthony Award-Best Short Story ("Hardly Knew Her")
2008 Barry Award-Best Novel (What the Dead Know)
2008 Macavity Award-Best Mystery (What the Dead Know)
2007 Anthony Award-Best Novel (No Good Deeds)
2007 Quill Award-Mystery (What the Dead Know)
2006 Gumshow Award-Best Novel (To the Power of the Three)
2004 Barry Award-Best Novel (Every Secret Thing)
2001 Nero Award (Sugar House)
2000 Anthony Award-Best Paperback Original (In Big Trouble)
2000 Shamus Award-Best Paperback Original (In Big Trouble)
1999 Anthony Award-Best Paperback Original (Butchers Hill)
1998 Agatha Award-Best Novel (Butchers Hill)
1998 Edgar Award-Best Paperback Original (Charm City)
1998 Shamus Award-Best Paperback Original (Charm City)
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
Originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine, Lippman's Tess Monaghan novella turns the intrepid Baltimore PI's at-risk late-pregnancy bed rest into a compellingly edgy riff on Hitchcock's Rear Window. Lovingly tucked up on her winterized sun porch, Tess marshals her forces—doting artist boyfriend Crow, best friend Whitney Talbot, middle-aged assistant gumshoe Mrs. Blossom, and researcher Dorie Starnes—to probe the disappearance of a chic blonde green-raincoated dog walker she'd been watching from her comfy prison. Tess also takes in the missing woman's abandoned green-slickered Italian greyhound from hell, a miniature canine terrorist whose anti-housebreaking vendetta offers comic relief from Tess's threatened pre-eclampsia, her obsessive unraveling of a complex scam, and her last-trimester spats with Crow about their future. Though postpartum Tess turns alternately weepy and shrill, that condition won't last, and this entertaining romp leaves plenty of hints of detective-mother exploits to come.
Publishers Weekly


Confined to bed rest for the last 12 weeks of her pregnancy, an immobilized Tess Monaghan (In Big Trouble) watches the world around her through binoculars, à la Hitchcock's classic Rear Window, admiring the girl in the green raincoat who walks her greyhound daily on a color-coordinated leash. But when she sees the dog scampering loose, Tess's investigative genes kick in, and she's intent on finding out what happened to the dog's walker, who turns out to be Carole Epstein, third wife of Don Epstein, a man with two dead wives and a dead girlfriend behind him. Despite Epstein's claims that Carole emptied their joint accounts and took off, Tess is suspicious enough to ask best friend Whitney Talbot to pose as a lure for the man, with unexpected results all around. Verdict: In this novella that first appeared in serial form in the New York Times Magazine, Lippman provides welcome background for many of her cast members as she advances Tess and her boyfriend Crow to a new stage in their lives. Lippman's trademark crisp prose, smart plotting, and appealing protagonist—whose physical limitations here make her no less feisty and resourceful when faced with danger—make this an essential addition to a winning series. —Michele Leber, Arlington VA
Library Journal


It’s always an event when Laura Lippman, who has won every major crime-fiction award going, delivers a new Tess Monaghan storyng.
Booklist

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Discussion Questions
1. The Girl in the Green Raincoat was originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine. How might a serialization—a work read in timed installments—affect the structure of the story? If you have read them, use other books in the Tess Monaghan series for comparison.

2. In the P.S., Laura Lippman reveals that to hold readers' interest in a single serial installment, she layered smaller stories within the larger narrative. Choose a few chapters from The Girl in the Green Raincoat to explore this layering effect. How are these contained stories interwoven into the larger story arc? How do they deepen your understanding of the characters and the plot?

3. How did Tess being bedridden affect her judgment and how she investigated the case? Think about how she set up the plot. Diagram each plot development, and discuss how together, they formed the story. Were you surprised at the outcome?

4. One of Laura Lippman's inspirations for The Girl in the Green Raincoat was the classic movie Rear Window. Have you seen the movie? If so, how do the two plots mirror each other? How are they different? Another influence is the Josephine Tey novel Daughter of Time. If you've read this book, compare and contrast the two stories as well.

5. If you have read previous Tess Monaghan stories, what did you learn about Tess that you didn't know? What about Crow and Tess's friend Whitney?

6. Tess is nervous about her relationship with Crow and having a baby, feelings brought to the surface with the investigation. Meeting the detective who looked into the death of the suspect's first wife, she asks him, "Did you know your wife was the one, the moment you met her? Or did it creep up on you?" If you are in a committed relationship, how would you answer? Do you believe in love at first sight?

7. When Crow's protege, Lloyd, proposes to his girlfriend May, the adults in their lives are upset and claim the young people are "too young to get married." What do you think? What are the benefits of waiting? But as Lloyd asks, why wait if you know you are sure?

8. Tess's life changes in many ways by the end of the book. How do you think these changes will affect her career as a private investigator?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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A Confederacy of Dunces 
John Kennedy Toole, 1980
Grove/Atlantic
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802130204


Summary
Winner, 1981 Pulitzer Prize

“When a true genius appears in the world,
You may know him by this sign, that the dunces
Are all in confederacy against him.”
—Jonathan Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting”

“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once.”

So enters one of the most memorable characters in American fiction, Ignatius J. Reilly. John Kennedy Toole’s hero is one, “huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans’ lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures” (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).

Ignatius J. Reilly is a flatulent frustrated scholar deeply learned in Medieval philosophy and American junk food, a brainy mammoth misfit imprisoned in a trashy world of Greyhound Buses and Doris Day movies. He is in violent revolt against the entire modern age.  Ignatius’ peripatetic employment takes him from Levy Pants, where he leads a workers’ revolt, to the French Quarter, where he waddles behind a hot dog wagon that serves as his fortress.

A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece that outswifts Swift, whose poem gives the book its title. Set in New Orleans, the novel bursts into life on Canal Street under the clock at D. H. Holmes department store.

The characters leave the city and literature forever marked by their presences—Ignatius and his mother; Mrs. Reilly’s matchmaking friend, Santa Battaglia; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levy Pants; inept, bemused Patrolman Mancuso; Jones, the jivecat in spaceage dark glasses. Juvenal, Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Swift, Dickens—their spirits are all here. Filled with unforgettable characters and unbelievable plot twists, shimmering with intelligence, and dazzling in its originality, Toole’s comic classic just keeps getting better year after year.

Released by Louisiana State University Press in April 1980 and published in paperback in 1981 by Grove Press, A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing short of a publishing phenomenon. Turned down by countless publishers and submitted by the author’s mother years after his suicide, the book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Today, there are over 1,500,000 copies in print worldwide in eighteen languages. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—December 17, 1937
• Where—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Death—March 26, 1969
• Where—Biloxi, Mississippi
• Education—B.A., Tulane University; M.A., Columbia
  University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize

Toole, known throughout his life to friends and family as "Ken", lived a sheltered childhood in Uptown New Orleans. His mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole, was a charmingly flamboyant but narcissistic woman, who doted on her only child. Toole's father worked as a car salesman and mechanic before succumbing to deafness and failing health, while his mother supplemented the family income with music lessons.

After earning an undergraduate degree from Tulane University, Toole received a master's degree at Columbia University, and spent a year as assistant professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana Lafayette) in Lafayette, Louisiana. Toole's next academic post was in New York City, where he taught at Hunter College. Although he pursued a doctorate at Columbia, his studies were interrupted by his being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961. Toole served two years in Puerto Rico teaching English to Spanish-speaking recruits.

Following his military service, Ken Toole returned to New Orleans to live with his parents and teach at Dominican College. He spent much of his time hanging around the French Quarter with musicians and, on at least one occasion, helped a musician friend with his second job selling tamales from a cart. While at Tulane University, Toole had worked briefly in a men's clothing factory. Both of these experiences inspired memorable scenarios in his comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces.

Toole sent the manuscript of his novel, written during the early 60's, to Simon and Schuster and, despite initial excitement about the work, the publisher eventually rejected it, commenting that it "isn't really about anything." Toole's health began to deteriorate as he lost hope of seeing his work – which he considered a masterpiece – in print. He stopped teaching at Dominican, quit his doctoral classes and began to drink heavily while being medicated for severe headaches.

Toole's biographers, Rene Pol Nevils and Deborah George Handy, have suggested that a factor in Toole's depression was confusion about his sexuality and identity. In their biography, Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole, they tracked down and interviewed many of Ken Toole's acquaintances. While one friend suggested that his domineering mother left no emotional room for any other woman in Toole's life (although he did date some women exclusively in his lifetime), others have disputed the suggestion that he was a homosexual, including David Kubach, a longtime friend who also served with Toole in the army. The authors of his biography, Ignatius Rising, were not personally acquainted with him, and "not knowing him makes a big difference", Kubach said.

Toole disappeared on January 20, 1969, after a dispute with his mother. Receipts found in his car show that Toole drove to the west coast and then to Milledgeville, Georgia. Here he visited the home of then deceased writer Flannery O'Connor. It was during what is assumed to be a trip back to New Orleans that Ken Toole stopped outside Biloxi, Mississippi, and committed suicide by putting one end of a garden hose into the exhaust pipe of his car and the other into the window of the car in which he was sitting. He died due to self-induced asphyxiation on March 26, 1969. An envelope was left on the dashboard of the car and was marked "to my parents". However, the suicide note inside the envelope was destroyed by his mother, who made conflicting statements as to its general contents. He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans.

After his death, Thelma Toole in 1976 insisted that author Walker Percy, by then a faculty member at Loyola University New Orleans, read the manuscript for Dunces. Percy was hesitant at first, but eventually gave in and fell in love with the book. A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980, and Percy provided the foreword.

The first printing was only 2500 copies by LSU Press. A number of these were sent to Scott Kramer, an executive and producer at 20th Century Fox, to pitch around Hollywood, but the book generated little initial interest there. However, the novel attracted much attention in the literary world. A year later, in 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book has sold more than 1.5 million copies in 18 languages.

Toole's only other novel is The Neon Bible, which he wrote at age 16 and considered too juvenile a writing attempt to submit for publication while he was alive. However, due to the great interest in Toole, The Neon Bible was published in 1989. The novel was made into a feature film of the same name in 1995. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews 
A masterwork of comedy.... The novel astonishes with its inventiveness, it lives in the play of its voices. A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing less than a grand comic fugue
New York Times Book Review


The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredible true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures
Henry Kisor - Chicago Sun-Times


The episodes explode one after the other like fireworks on a story night. No doubt about it, this book is destined to become a classic.
Baltimore Sun

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Discussion Questions 
1. Walker Percy (in the Introduction) uses the words gargantuan and Falstaffian to describe Ignatius.  Is it only his size that makes Ignatius seem larger than life?  Percy likens him to the late screen comic Oliver Hardy.  To which more recent personalities could Ignatius be compared?

2. The first chapter of A Confederacy of Dunces is generally thought to be among the funniest in American literature. Do you agree?  What other comic novels remind you of A Confederacy of Dunces and why?

3. Ignatius constantly criticizes and deprecates his mother while relying on her to keep his life together. Does she feel the same way about her son?  What does she need from him and what does she get for her pains?

4. The city of New Orleans plays a central role in the novel, seeming to be a character in and of itself. ould this novel have been set in another American city?  Elaborate. 

5. Project Ignatius and Myrna into the future. They are supposed to be in love, but find themselves fighting before ever leaving the city.  Will they make it to New York? Can New York survive Ignatius?   What possibilities do you see for them?

6. Ignatius is a virgin, but Myrna declares herself to be sexually uninhibited. Is each telling the truth?  Can you see them becoming intimate?  Discuss this in light of your own experience or that of a friend’s.

7. Ignatius thinks of himself as a knight errant seeking to set the modern world in line with his theories of good taste and solid geometry. Are his efforts doomed to failure?  Has he chosen his quests unwisely or does the fault lie in his personality?  Is the way he views the world askew?

8. Is Ignatius purely lazy or does his attitude toward work reflect his disdain for the modern world of commerce?  Ignatius feels he is an anachronism.  Where would he fit in? 

9. Although the book is longer than the average novel, Walker Percy fought against it being severely edited.  What do you think of his decision?  If you were to expand or cut something, what would it be?

10. The book is elaborately plotted, but does it work?  What do you find unbelievable or improbable?

11.  In the forty years since A Confederacy of Dunces was written our attitudes toward what constitutes pornography have changed.  Given the same circumstances, would Lana Lee be arrested today for her bird show?  Develop a scenario suitable for today’s more permissive times.  

12. It is unusual for a current novel to use written dialect.  Would A Confederacy of Dunces be the same if characters like Burma and Santa spoke in standard English? 

13.  In the twenty-plus years since its publication A Confederacy of Dunces has become a cult novel.  What does that mean to you? Give examples of other cult novels you may have read.  Have you joined in slavish devotion to any of these works?

14. In a letter dated March 5, 1965, Toole critiques his own novel writing that he “was certain that the Levys were the book’s worst flaw” and “that couple kept slipping from my grasp as I tried to manipulate them throughout the book”  (Nevils and Hardy, page 139).  What did he mean?  And do you agree?  Are they the only characters who don’t come to life?  Toole lauds other characters as being representative of New Orleans.  Who do you think they might be?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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