Author Sherri Browning Erwin ‘90, has recently released her latest novel, Jane Slayre. The book follows in the footsteps of the insanely popular Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, taking a classic tale and giving it a modern makeover with more than a hint of fantasy. The title character of Browning Erwin’s novel is a young girl who, after being orphaned, is raised by vampires. The book has been well received by readers, and Erwin, busy promoting her newest work, recently took some time to answer our questions.

With summer rapidly approaching, stacks of leisure books are looking rather enticing compared to that mountain of textbooks and PDF files you’ve collected over the past semester. As soon as finals are through, you’re itching to pick up something that doesn’t include the words “gender,” “lipid,” “tariff,” or “mise-en-scene.” So when you rally yourself for days in the sun, fully equipped with a bottle of SPF 30 and a mobile-library’s worth of books, be sure to scope out these sites that will take your summer reading list out of your bookshelf and into your closet.

Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic is a novel with two weddings, neither one the protagonist’s own, but both frame his own marital relationship. Griffin, the protagonist, must come to terms with his own failed marriage as well as his parents’ as he grapples with letting go of his father (he has been driving around with the ashes in his trunk for almost a year.) Russo deals with the universal fear of becoming one’s parents. Following in his parents’ footsteps careerwise, Jack Griffin, a fifty- seven year old ex-screenwriter, now an English professor, tries desperately to avoid reenacting their marital problems as he fumbles through his own.

It is true that the follow-up to Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi features animals. We may acknowledge that the titles characters of Beatrice and Virgil are a donkey and a howler monkey, respectively, and let us move on. This is a book that deserves to be taken on its own merit, without being tied to a work of the past.

A wind stooped pine tree. A driverless blue mustang. A skydiving giantess. An eight inch cast iron skillet. These are the vivid images carried through John Irving’s twelfth novel, Last Night in Twisted River. The book begins in 1956 in a New Hampshire logging settlement called Twisted River where twelve year old Daniel Baciagalupo inadvertently kills someone with the aforementioned skillet, thinking a bear has broken into the house. The boy and his father Dominic, the cook for the logging village, are forced to go on the run, cutting all ties except for those with the live free or die logger, Ketchum.

Though most recent works on evolution spawned by the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentennial of The Origin of Species’ publication have centered on the sciences’ founding studies and works, Neil Shubin’s monograph explores the impact of a more recent discovery. A professor of organismal and evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago and provost of the Field Museum, Shubin entered the public eye upon his discovery of a Devonian period creature whose combination of piscine and tetrapod traits led to its initial description as a “fishapod.”

It’s hard to imagine that Bill Cotter’s 2009 Fever Chart could have content so eccentric as to befit its cover. The cover, after all, is a medley of bright colors and distorted cartoons of urban debris, centering in upon a male figure whose body is animated, kinetic and dripping blood.

An interview with Wells Tower.

Apparently, Wells Tower is famous. Before reading his debut collection of short stories, bearing the weighty title, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, I had never heard his (unique) name. He divides his time between journalism and short stories and has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post and Harper’s Magazine.

New book releases.