Word: austen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Quinn's specialty is Regency romances, which are set in the England of the early 1800s--think Jane Austen. There are eight subgenres of romance in all, including paranormal romance (which involves magic and the supernatural) and time-travel romance (love conquers all, including the space-time continuum). This kind of specialization is typical of the genre--romance novels are marketed more like computers or Tupperware than books. They are not works of art. They are highly targeted commodities, engineered to a set of tightly controlled specifications. The formula seems to work: romance novels rang up $1.5 billion in retail...
Nineteenth century psychiatrists coined a term for the irresistible impulse to swipe: they called it kleptomania, from the Greek kleptein, to steal. It was applied after the fact to Jane Austen's aunt, who was tried in 1800 for pocketing fancy white lace. By the 1920s Freudian psychologists, always attuned to underlying sexual drives, were comparing the rush from a successful filch to the pleasure of an orgasm. Experts today are more inclined to compare recreational larceny to thrill-seeking behaviors like bungee jumping or to addictions like drug abuse or compulsive gambling...
...feel as though we’ve lost a friend; we go to sleep and dream that we’re at Pemberly or on Prospero’s island. The next day we get up and ask ourselves about Austen or Shakespeare’s portrayal of love, good and evil, friendship or forgiveness...
...paper's bureau there, becoming the only American newspaperman to be based in Vietnam at war and at peace. The opposite of a jaded war correspondent, Lamb captures the country he came to love mostly through its people: an eager young waiter who is making his way through Jane Austen (in English); a handicapped veteran who confesses to no anger except with himself; a young Vietnamese-Australian lawyer who works tirelessly to help resettle boat people; and 11 returning G.I.s who swap sneakers and old pictures with the men they once fought against...
...undemanding games of badminton or kickball. My parents pushed us to read and calculate, not to throw and run. My older brother erected a basketball hoop in our driveway that went unused after a year of initial excitement, and my brilliant, studious sister preferred the newspaper or a Jane Austen novel to a game of basketball or tennis. Both siblings ultimately turned out swell—I, in fact, became the black sheep of the family after they both graduated from med school. But while academics were our “thing,” sports were clearly...