"This fun romp covers it all—car chases, shootings, eccentric-uncles-turned-amateur-playwrights and end-of-the-world computer viruses."—Publishers Weekly Charley Fairfax—heiress, theatrical producer, newlywed—is intent on living happily ever after with her tall, dark, and sarcastic husband Jack. The only mysteries before her are which play to choose for next season and how to decorate her dining room. But when Jack is hired to investigate mysterious events at a local San Francisco software company where high-tech executives are brought low—actually, dead—Charley finds herself poised to do the unexpected. Charley has to get a job. Okay, so maybe the job is a sham and Jack isn't exactly crazy about the plan that she and her band of irregulars from the repertory theater go undercover to find a killer, but Charley is determined to trade in her Prada for a laptop. She quickly finds herself wishing she'd had more than one crash course in corporate double-speak before her first day on the job. But faking it has always been Charley's strong suit. Charley and Jack are starting to get the hang of this marriage thing. If only people would stop talking about babies, introducing them to decorators, and trying to kill them, they might even get to take a honeymoon.

"Viktor Shklovsky's 1925 book Theory of Prose might have become the most important work of literary criticism in the twentieth century had not two obstacles barred its way: the crackdown by the Soviet dictatorship on Shklovsky and other Russian Formalists in the 1930s, and the unavailability of an English translation. Now translated in its entirety for the first time, Theory of Prose not only anticipates structuralism and post-structuralism, but poses questions about the nature of fiction that are as provocative today as they were in the 1920s. Arguing that writers structure their material according to artistic principles rather than from attempts to imitate "reality," Shklovsky uses Cervantes, Tolstoi, Sterne, Dickens, Bely, and Rozanov to give us a new way of thinking about fiction and, in his most impassioned moments, about the world. Benjamin Sher's lucid translation will allow Shklovsky's Theory of Prose to fulfill its destiny as a major theoretical work of the twentieth century." from back cover.