By Elaine Dundy
260 pages; New York Review Books

Before Bridget Jones, deeply sweet and recklessly intimate Sally Jay Gorce trolled for love (Parisian style) in novelist (and sometime wife of theater critic Kenneth Tynan) Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado (New York Review Books), a madcap read from 1958 that's finally back in print in the United States.

— Cathleen Medwick