Swan’s international bestselling novel The Wives of Bath, is both a shocking Gothic tale about a murder in a girls’ boarding school and an adolescent confession. Mouse and Paulie, reluctant fourteen-year-old boarders at Bath Ladies College, are confronted by the slippery quest for one small, vital thing: the thing that definitively makes boys different from girls. The novel was made into the feature film Lost and Delirious, shown in 34 countries. Since the film’s debut, young women all over the world have role-played the parts of Mouse, Tory and Paulie on the Lost and Delirious website.

THE STORY: Fearing cuckoldry above all else, Arnolphe has painstakingly trained the guileless Agnes from childhood to become his obedient and faithful wife. Although he has carefully shielded her from the outside world, romance finds her in the for

Art is a hard mistress, and there is no art quite so hard as that of being a wife. So begins this entertaining and enlightening booklet of Don'ts for Wives. Discussing such categories as "How to Avoid Discord," "Financial Matters," "Food," and "Evenings at Home," Don'ts for Wives is full of advice for ways in a which a proper and loving wife should behave toward her husband. Each chapter is comprised of a list of "don'ts" that wives should follow if they wish to run a successful home and keep their husbands happy. While much of the advice is outdated, a surprising number of her recommendations are still applicable today. A delightful glimpse into turn-of-the-century British life, Don'ts for Wives is for anyone interested in etiquette, sociology, or who is just looking for a laugh. Also part of this series are Don'ts for Husbands and Don'ts for Mothers, available from Cosimo Classics.

Many readers may know that such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence used their marriages for literary inspiration and material. In Russian literary marriages, these women did not resent taking a secondary position, although to call their position secondary does not do justice to the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history. From Sofia Tolstoy to Vera Nabokov and Elena Mandelshtam and Natalya Solzhenitsyn, these women ranged from stenographers and typists to editors, researchers, translators, and even publishers. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers’ illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West. Many of these women, like Vera and Sofia, were the writers’ intellectual companions and willingly contributed to the creative process—they commonly used the word “we” to describe the progress of their husbands’ work. And their husbands knew it too. Leo Tolstoy made no secret of Sofia’s involvement in War and Peace, and Vladimir Nabokov referred to Vera as his own “single shadow.”