The Little Children by Tom Perotta

Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out, down to scheduling a weekly roll in the hay with her husband, every Tuesday at 9pm. They all raise their kids in the kind of sleepy American suburb where nothing ever seems to happen-at least until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two restless parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could have imagined. Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Perrotta's previous novels, Little Children exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.  ~review

About the Author

Tom Perrotta is a novelist and short story writer whose work explores the adolescent experience.  Perrotta grew up in New Jersey and currently lives outside Boston. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University and his M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. He has taught writing at Yale University and Harvard University.  He is also the author of Joe College and Election: A Novel, a satirical, funny story about a suburban New Jersey high school election gone haywire that became an acclaimed Paramount movie starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.  

-A remarkably astute observer of youth culture, Perrotta has been called "a writer to watch" by The Washington Times.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

To call Middlesex a coming-of-age novel about a hermaphrodite would be like calling The Odyssey a story about some guy on a boat. Middlesex is nothing short of epic; one family's survival on a twisted path through Greece to 20th Century America; battles ranging from the fires of the Turkish wars, the igniting of Michigan race riots, and the burning desires hidden within a girl named Callie and the man named Cal who she is to become.  ~review

Interview with Author

I've known Jeffrey Eugenides for several years and in several contexts — first as one of his readers, then as a student of his at Princeton, and now as a friend. From the beginning of his novel The Virgin Suicides to the end of his most recent email, I've always been enamored of how vivid Jeff's mind is and how clearly he seems to know what it is he wants to say. All of which made me excited not only to have an early look at his forthcoming novel Middlesex but to hear some of his ideas in this more formal context about writing and life. 

In The Virgin Suicides, the narrative voice was a first-person-plural "we." Middlesex is told by a hermaphrodite who was raised as a girl and later started living as a male. Obviously you like to complicate the narrative voices in your fiction. Voices you don't hear every day. The "we" voice in The Virgin Suicides came easily, however. It was the first thing I had, really. The first paragraph was told by this collective narrator and the book grew from that. With Middlesex, it was different. I had a story in mind but I didn't have the right voice to tell it with. The voice had to be elastic enough to narrate the epic stuff, the third-person material, and it had to be a highly individualized first-person voice, too.

For a long time I didn't believe what I was writing, but then I gave Cal permission to zigzag between first and third person, and then I did believe it. A lot of time passed while I was screwing around with all this, but then I finally had my starting point. All I had to do was write another 530 pages. ~by Jonathan Safran Foer

Hermaphroditus

In The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, the god Hermaphroditus is "a double-sexed being ... with womanish breasts and long hair." Classicists gush that he/she was as handsome as his father (Hermes) and as beautiful as his mother (Aphrodite). One assumes that this mythic model would render the Greeks benevolent to their double-gendered offspring, but no... They invariably destroyed them at birth, as the Romans later did. Two-to-three people out of every one thousand are born hermaphroditic (claims Robert Edgerton's 1964 study published in American Anthropologist), and almost every culture tries to "fix" this minority. 

Madame Secretary by Madeleine Albright

In winding up her far-ranging autobiography, Madeleine Albright tells us with amusement that once, after leaving office as U.S. Secretary of State, she was mistaken in public for Margaret Thatcher. They both reached the highest rank ever attained by a woman in their respective democratic governments. Were fiercely partisan political figures, and held very strong opinions and were never afraid to battle for them.

Albright is best known for serving as U.S. ambassador to the UN in the first Clinton term, and as Secretary of State in the second. The other thing about Albright that most people will recall is that only after she became Secretary of State did she learn that her family ancestry was Jewish --- that three of her grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps. 

Her life, though unsettled due to wartime exigencies, was not a rags-to-riches tale. She was born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague into a comfortably situated family. Her father was a respected Czech diplomat and college professor. Fleeing the Nazis, the family spent time in England during World War II. They arrived in the United States when she was 11, and her father took a teaching job in Denver. She entered Wellesley College in 1955 and became an American citizen two years later. She married into a wealthy and well-connected American family in 1959. Her first political idol and mentor was Edmund Muskie, in whose doomed presidential campaign she took part. After the breakup of her marriage, her career in government and politics took off during the Carter presidency, her only personal setback being a painful divorce in 1983. ~reviewed by Robert Finn 

Madame Albright Quotes 

"All women kind of feel that every day they have to do a superior job." 

"Because in some way or another, by somebody, I am reminded of the fact that I'm a woman in a man's world.” 

"I like being a woman and I figure I use everything I have.”

"I'm pretty spontaneous. And I think it's taken me 63 years, but I know who I am." 

"I literally have, sometimes, this out of body experience, just thinking, well Madeleine Albright is a person," Albright says, "who is secretary of state." 

"And then there is the person who comes home from work, ...and nobody would believe this but I go and I put on my flannel nightgown, have cottage cheese, and go and watch television. And that's Madeleine." 

"I love makeup and I need it tonight...because I just got off the plane.” 

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

A murder mystery set against a religious conspiracy theory involving Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, their child and the Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code mixes page-turning suspense with art history, architecture and religious history. — Ayesha Court

The Secret Life of Leonardo da Vinci 

A prankster and genius, Leonardo da Vinci is widely believed to have hidden secret messages within much of his artwork. Most scholars agree that even Da Vinci's most famous pieces—works like The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and Madonna of the Rocks—contain startling anomalies that all seem to be whispering the same cryptic message…a message that hints at a shocking historical secret which allegedly has been guarded since 1099 by a European secret society known as the Priory of Sion. In 1975, Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Botticelli, and Leonardo da Vinci. French President, Francois Mitterrand, is rumored to have been a member, although there exists no proof of this.

~authors website

Here is what we can say about Jesus’ sex life: 

Most mainstream biblical scholars do not believe Jesus was married to anyone, because the Gospels don’t mention it.  A few biblical scholars argue it’s likely Jesus was married--even though the Bible doesn’t mention it—because Jewish men at that time nearly always married. These scholars tend not to care one way or another whether his wife was Mary Magdalene. According to the New Testament: The Gospels say Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus and that, according to Luke 8, she supported him out of her own means, meaning that she was probably wealthy. She was the first, or among the first, to discover the empty tomb.

Mona Lisa

Never in the history of Art has one painting been so admired. This is due largely to the enigmatic smile, which has caused much speculation. Nowhere can be found any records of the Mona Lisa model sitting.  Dr. Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs suggests that Leonardo painted himself, She digitized both the self-portrait of the artist and the Mona Lisa. She flipped the self portrait and merged the two images together using a computer. She noticed the features of the face aligned perfectly!