The Long Lavender Look

When I first arrived at Ballantine, where I am the mass market managing editor, we were just undergoing a daunting task: repackaging all of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels. We were giving him a brand-new, beautiful look; ingeniously, we used a deep blue color for THE DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY, a gold color for A DEADLY SHADE OF GOLD, a lavender hue for THE LONG LAVENDER LOOK, etc. But as I worked on the actual stories themselves, I realized that as colorful as these books now are on the outside, they're even more colorful on the inside.

Signed, Mata Hari: A Novel

In life, at least before the espionage charges, it was Mata Hari's body that made her mesmerizing; in this alluring novel, it is her hypnotic voice. As softly poetic as it is insistent, it entices the reader from the first lines to give Mata Hari what she always craved: not the secrets that are the currency of a spy, but the rapt attention that is oxygen to a performer. 

The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventheenth-century Chinese Literature

The "phantom heroine"--in particular the fantasy of her resurrection through sex with a living man--is one of the most striking features of traditional Chinese literature. Even today the hypersexual female ghost continues to be a source of fascination in East Asian media, much like the sexually predatory vampire in American and European movies, TV, and novels. But while vampires can be of either gender, erotic Chinese ghosts are almost exclusively female. The significance of this gender asymmetry in Chinese literary history is the subject of Judith Zeitlin's elegantly written and meticulously researched new book.

Return of the Bunny Suicides

Return of the Bunny Suicides follows over one hundred bunnies as they find ever more bizarre ways to end their fuzzy little existences. From swimming with nibbly fishes, to hiding under an elephant’s footstool, to getting on the sharp end of a Venetian gondola—no stone goes unturned (or undropped, or uncatapulted) in the twisted little creatures’ next installment.

Illustrated in a spare and simple style, Return of the Bunny Suicides is a collection of hilarious and outrageous cartoons that will appeal to anyone in touch with their evil side.

Einstein's Dreams

If you liked the eerie whimsy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Steven Millhauser's Little Kingdoms, or Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths, you will love Alan Lightman's ethereal yet down-to-earth book Einstein's Dreams. Lightman teaches physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helping bridge the light-year-size gap between science and the humanities, the enemy camps C.P. Snow famously called The Two Cultures.