Vladimir

With romance novels replacing their Fabio-licious covers with cute cartoony illustrations, it's refreshing to see Vladimir stepping boldly, winkingly, into the void. And the winking continues inside. As our story begins, our narrator, self-described as an "oldish white woman in her late fifties," has the title character, a hot young English department hire with a hot new novel and an even younger wife, tied up and asleep in a chair, where she can admire his beauty undisturbed. From there, Jonas spins out a tale of campus adultery that is both familiar and slyly subversive, thoroughly witty and almost as cheeky as its cover and opening promise.