"Biography gets no better than this," someone wrote about this book when it first appeared. Since that someone was me, I am happy to confirm my original assessment of Jean Strouse's absorbing life of the invalid Alice James, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series. "The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that “simply” the profundity it deserves.
The world mapped in Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?
Childlike retreat? D.I.Y. challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.


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