The real John Dee was born in 1527 in London, England. He was educated at St. John’s College in Cambdrige, made a founding fellow of Trinity College, and traveled Europe in order to study cartography and mathematics. He gained a reputation as a magician early in his life, apparently after creating an accomplished set of stage effects for a play performed at Trinity. After returning to England, Dee became Queen Mary I’s consultant-astrologer, a position that led to accusations of conjuring and, eventually, imprisonment. Although he was freed not long after, accusations such as this would circle him the rest of his life. When Elizabeth was crowed queen, Dee was asked to choose the day of her coronation. Elizabeth liked Dee and took him on as her personal astrologer and medical advisor.

Although best known for his knowledge of the occult, Dee’s accomplishments were rich and varied. At one time, he owned the largest private library in all of England–4,000 books strong. He published on both matters both supernatural (The Hieroglyphic Monad, a discussion of a symbol intended to “express the mystical unity of all creation“) and scientific (a preface to Euclid’s Elements discussing the wide influence that mathematics had on other disciplines). Later in life he turned more frequently to the supernatural, believing that he could make contact with angels. Dee fell out of the royal court’s favor after Elizabeth’s death, and he died impoverished in 1608.

Parris is not the first writer to take on Dee’s legacy: it is thought that Shakespeare modeled The Tempest’s Prospero on him. More recently, Damon Albarn penned Dr Dee: An English Opera; the biographical work premiered in 2011 in Manchester and will play in London this summer, in a festival coinciding with the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Click to read an excerpt from Prophecy and to download our reading group guide.

The Cranes Dance by Meg Howrey is the story of Kate Crane, a soloist in a celebrated New York City ballet company who is struggling to keep her place in a very demanding world. At every turn, Kate is haunted by her close relationship with her younger sister, a fellow company dancer who has recently suffered a breakdown and returned home. Funny, dark, intimate, and unflinchingly honest, The Cranes Dance reveals the private lives of dancers and the complicated relationships between sisters. In honor of her behind-the-curtain novel, we asked Meg to come up with a list of her five favorite backstage books.

I love being backstage. I spent a good portion of my life on the performer’s side of the curtain and it never really lost its magic for me. The callboards, the dressing rooms, the black packing cases stenciled in white, the racks of costumes, the wigs, the prop tables. Dressers. Stagehands. Musicians. “Ladies and gentlemen this is your half-hour call. Half-hour to curtain.” The smell of the greasepaint. Actually, I have no idea what greasepaint smells like. Today’s makeup doesn’t smell like much of anything, but the smell of greasepaint figures prominently in theatrical stories written in 1930s England and that’s where I’ll begin my list of five favorite backstage novels.

1. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

The first of the classic “Shoes” series. Noel Streatfeild apparently once said of the novel: “The story poured off my pen, more or less telling itself…I distrusted what came so easily and so despised the book.” Pauline, Petrova, and Posy Fossil, three orphaned girls raised as sisters in London, are sent to the Children’s Academy of Dancing and Stage Training in the hopes that they might earn their living as child performers. Pauline is pretty and proves to be a natural actress. Posy is a brilliant dancer. Petrova cares nothing about dancing or acting, and yearns to become a mechanic or a pilot. Pauline and Posy thrive at the school. Petrova is miserable, but carries on in order not to worry the children’s haggard guardian, Sylvia. The lack of money haunts every chapter, and the harsher realities of show business are not neglected. But the books are charming, and one hopes the adoration of generations of devoted readers did something to assuage Streatfeild’s self-criticism, although knowing writers, probably not.

Additional note: Reading the “Shoes” series allowed me, a child growing up in a tiny town in Illinois, to become intensely familiar with Britishisms. I learned that robes were “dressing gowns,” “mean” also meant “stingy,” and elevators were “lifts.” I loved all this as much as the depictions of theatrical life and employed my new vocabulary whenever possible. What the other kids at the Danville Community Pool thought of me referring to my swimsuit as a “bathing costume,” God only knows.

2. Light Thickens by Ngaio Marsh

New Zealand-born Ngaio Marsh wrote 32 detective novels, and I read most of them during my freshman year at performing arts school. Marsh’s detective is Roderick Alleyn—posher and sexier than Christie’s Poirot, less fey and chatty than Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. C.I.D. Alleyn knows his Shakespeare and quite a few of the mysteries take place at a theater, giving Alleyn ample opportunity to quote the Bard and sniff out clues hidden under the smell of (you guessed it) greasepaint. My favorite is Light Thickens. The murder doesn’t take place until nearly three-quarters of the way through the book, and by then we’ve had the delight of watching a production of Macbeth take shape in a West End theater. Marsh was a director and producer, and the descriptions here are so vivid and layered that I felt a real sense of loss when the murder occurred. I felt bad for the victim, of course, but quite desolate that the appearance of the actor’s dismembered head during a performance meant that the play had to be cancelled. It sounded like a really good show.

Additional note: More vocabulary came from Marsh, and possibly this was where my preference for spelling words English-fashion was born. Favourites gleaned from these days: “ghastly,” “insufferable,” and “waggish.”

3. Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham

In my late teens I shared an apartment in New York with a girl who was majoring in English at Fordham. She turned me on to Maugham, and I still feel great affection for him. Maugham is famous for having had four plays running simultaneously in London, and actors appear frequently in his fiction. Although he often portrayed them as callow and vain, Maugham’s actors command a certain begrudging respect: if they sin in private life they almost never do against their craft.

This moment from Theatre will ring true for any performer: Julia, the protagonist, is a celebrated stage actress in the prime of her talent and public success. She has an affair with a man half her age, he dumps her for a younger woman, and in a scene near the end of the novel she uses the despair to fuel her performance. Julia pours her wounded heart out on stage, and takes comfort in the fact that she has never “played so magnificently.” This goes on for a few nights until Julia’s director—who is also her husband—comes backstage to castigate her for her performance, calling it “about as rotten a piece of ham-acting as I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Julia fights him for a minute. After all, her performance had been rapturously received with “innumerable curtain calls.” But then—

She thought it over. She knew exactly what had happened. She had let her emotion run away with her; she had been feeling, not acting.

Additional note: Maugham had a Moorish symbol—the hand of Fatima warding off the evil eye–imprinted on the cover of his books. My roommate had it tattooed on her bicep.

4. Tempest-Tost by Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies’ first novel about a group of amateurs engaged in putting on a play is both hilarious and touching. Though Davies’ satirical touch spares no one, it is never dismissive. Even the most pretentious characters are treated with a kind of affection, and though we long for their comeuppance, we can’t help wanting to comfort them when it arrives. These are real people and as such they have little self-knowledge, confused and contradictory desires, delusions of grandeur, and sometimes, great kindness. When you have real people attempt a community theater production of The Tempest, you can be assured of wild waters in a roar.

Additional note: A friend of mine invited the locals of her Northern California town to participate in an informal outdoor reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Copies of an abridged version were sent out, parts assigned, and participants told to assemble in a neighbor’s glade. Mingling with the invitees before we got started, I heard many of them express timidity or self-consciousness about reading in front of other people. That lasted about five minutes. Given permission, retired academics, park rangers, and horse vets will emote their mud boots off. It was so successful that they are repeating the evening again with The Tempest, and I hear competition for the good roles is fierce.

5. Artistic Differences by Charlie Hauck

Since I live in Los Angeles now it makes sense to include a backstage in Hollywood novel. This one is about a television writer engaged in getting a new half-hour comedy off the ground, written by a television writer of many successful situation comedies. You can basically open it up to any page and start laughing. I will perform this experiment now:

Generally television critics are forgiving of actors and blame everything on the writers. You can watch an actor absolutely sabotage a good script and then read reviews like “Unfortunately, even the impressive talents of Cheech Marin could not salvage Anton Chekhov’s trite and meandering script.”

Additional note: I thought it was hilarious satire and mentioned it in my book club, which is largely comprised of television writers. Everyone had read it, everyone agreed it was hilarious, but no one thought it was satire.

I’m due for another good backstage novel soon. Since I’ve become a writer the smell of the greasepaint (whatever that is) has gone out of my daily experience. Luckily I still have friends in the business who occasionally send snippets of life behind the curtain. Like my friend up at Oregon Shakespeare who sent me this text yesterday:

Just heard: “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. It’s now 12:30. One hour to curtain. Could we have actors to the stage for fight call please. We’ll start with the kids getting killed.”

In the following video interview with Maeve, she discusses the book’s colorful characters (including Emily, Noel’s American cousin) and reveals what she likes most about Minding Frankie.

Click to read an excerpt from the book and to download our reading group guide.

In her introduction to the novel, translator Sandra Smith discusses the parallels between Jezebel’s main character and Irène Némirovsky’s own mother. Below, read Smith’s introduction as well as excerpt from the novel. Plus, download discussion resources for your reading group.

Click to read more excerpts from Vintage and Anchor Originals on Scribd!

Everyone loves a wedding. The dresses, the champagne, the romance—who can resist? But for Isabella, Mary, and Lauren, weddings are no longer a special occasion. It seems like everyone they know is getting ready to the knot. Bridal shower after bridal shower they coo over toasters and eat minuscule sandwiches. Amid the celebration these women have their own lives to contend with: Isabella is working a dead-end job, Mary is dating a nice guy with an awful mother, and Lauren is waitressing at a midtown bar and wondering why she’s attracted to the sleazy bartender.

Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close is a witty, wry novel that perfectly captures the wild frustrations and soaring joys of modern life.

Select Praise for Girls in White Dresses:

“Remarkably relatable…. Close’s debut is an addictive, thoughtful, slice of life.” —Entertainment Weekly

“What a delight! The young women in this hugely appealing book are charming, funny, rueful, poignant. . . . One of the freshest and most appealing new voices in fiction.” —Ann Packer

“[Close’s characters] grumble good-naturedly through their friends’ weddings and the births of their babies… with the pluck and gimlet eye of Carrie Bradshaw’s younger, smarter sisters.” —Vanity Fair

“You’ll relate, but mostly you’ll laugh as Close turns her sweet-tart wit on the dating and mating shenanigans of this tight-knit group of friends.” —Redbook

“This debut will ring bells. Wedding bells…. An uncanny portrait emerges of a time in life marked by too many hangovers, bad dates and bridal showers—as well as an abundance of solid friendships.” —People

Click to read an excerpt, download our reading group guide, and read Barbara Delinsky’s notes on the novel.

When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband in a subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom? Of the book, Cutting For Stone author Abraham Verghese said: “Here is a deeply felt journey into a culture foreign to many—yet with a theme that is universal in its appeal. A terrific novel that stayed with me long after I’d finished its final, haunting pages. This is a real discovery.” Click to download our reading group guide and to read an excerpt.

We’re giving away ten copies of Please Look After Mom. Click to enter for your chance to win! Sweepstakes us open to United States residents 18 and over; entries must be received by April 26, 2012 at 11:59 pm.

Perla by Carolina de Robertis is a coming-of-age story about a young woman who makes a devastating discovery about her origins with the help of an enigmatic houseguest. Set in Buenos Aires and based on a recent shocking chapter of Argentine history, it is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of one young woman’s search for truth. While your book club discusses Perla, why not treat yourselves to some homemade flan? Carolina de Robertis has provided us with her mother’s recipe, now translated into English for the first time!

Click to download our reading group guide for Perla.

(If you have trouble viewing the recipe in the widget below, please click here to view on the Scribd website.)

The Love of My Youth illuminates the period of change in the 1960s, both for the country and for two young people falling in love and struggling with the shifting emotional landscape between themselves, and then given this unexpected period of reflection together as people in their sixties, a completely different phase of life with its own challenges and perspectives. Click to read an excerpt and to download our reading group guide.

In Henning Mankell’s latest Kurt Wallander mystery, The Troubled Man, Wallander must come to terms with two baffling mysteries. First, his daughter’s father-in-law has disappeared. And second? Having turned sixty, and having long neglected his health, Wallander has become convinced that his memory is failing. Fans of Mankell’s unconventional detective will love the latest installment in the series, about which the San Francisco Chronicle said, “[It is] at once richer in personal detail and more suspenseful than either a work of strictly mainstream fiction or a simple police novel could be.” In honor of the paperback publication of The Troubled Man, this edition of the Armchair Adventurer is devoted to Wallander’s longtime stomping grounds: Ystad, Sweden.

Ystad is a town of 18,350 located in the south of Sweden originally settled in the 12th century. The town is home to Sweden’s oldest preserved monastery, Gråbrödraklostret, now operated as a museum. There are also several castles still standing, many of which can be toured (the Touism Office recommends stopping in for a map). Fans of the arts can catch a performance at the town’s lovely 19th-century theater, and jazz fans will want to plan their trip for August 2012, when the town will host a jazz festival.

Much of Ystad’s current popularity is due to the Wallander books, a fact the Tourism Office has fully embraced—they’ve even created a guide to many of the book’s key locations! “In the Footsteps of Wallander” offers photos and descriptions of locations depicted in Mankell’s books. The feature also includes a guide to locations where the films based on the Wallander books—both the Swedish films and the recent BBC series—were shot. We particularly like these photos of Kåseberga and Ales stenar, where Wallander once surprised Anette Brolin with a picnic (in Faceless Killers). Also be sure to take a peek at Wallander’s favorite cafe, Fridolfs konditori, and Mariagatan, the street where Wallander lives. Those visiting Ystad can download a walking tour app (available for iPhone and Android users).

Finally, for a glimpse of Ystad’s beautiful geography and charming streets, watch the brief film below…and don’t be surprised if you find yourself considering a visit to this gorgeous town!

Click to read an excerpt from The Troubled Man and to download our reading group guide.