title: Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's Irony
author:  Victoria Silver 
description: "A masterful rethinking of Milton's work, this book is sure to become a standard text for all dedicated students of religious poetry . . . As a sensitive exploration of the unknowable deity of God and its ramifications for human faith, Silver's book should be of interest to anyone concerned with Milton specifically or Christian thought more generally."<b>---Heather Shillinglaw, <i>Religious Studies Quarterly</i></b><br /><br />"This is a deeply intelligent and philosophically sophisticated meditation on the crucial issues in Milton's poetry and their relationship to the crucial issues of Western thought. I was struck by its power and radical intelligence. The book will have an immediate and significant impact."<b>Stanley Fish, University of Illinois at Chicago</b><br /><br />"This is a truly wonderful book. It will establish Silver as a leading Miltonist. She writes with extraordinary grace and power, and has a remarkable stylistic gift. The turn of her sentences and the shape of her paragraphs have a kind of Mozartian musicality that has charmed me and will charm other readers. The subject of her book is a disturbing and to some degree iconoclastic one. This is a big book in every way, and gives us a new Milton."<b>J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine</b><br /><br />"Victoria Silver's book has an inclusiveness that I find comparable to Milton's own. With a clarity that is uncanny given the range of materials she brings into play and keeps there, she holds Milton's enterprise in front of her reader by appealing continuingly to an array of coordinates. As she applies to Milton's interests her readings of works by a much larger cast, she is invariably provocative and to the point. Her book unfolds seamlessly whatever writer it is she is addressing. Silver is someone who knows how to write a completely engaging book about everything under the sun. As each of the best books is, hers is one of a kind."<b>James McMichael, author of <i>The World at Large, New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996</i></b><br /><br />"Silver's book is a seminal study that significantly revises our understanding of the topics that it pursues, each topic having been and continuing to be a major focus of scholarly and critical commentary on Milton. It is also a study in the history of ideas. Expansive in its interpretation of Milton's irony, it achieves a synergy that more monocular studies lack."<b>Albert C. Labriola, Duquesne University</b>
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  Smokescreen
  
  
  Anne Mather
  
  
  **Alex was not the man**
  
  
  **she expected him to be**
  
  
  The time for Olivia's revenge had come. Her elderly husband,
  
  
  Henry Gantry, was dead. She'd take Henry's monument to
  
  
  himself, his fabulously wealthy corporation, and either sell it or
  
  
  put it in the hands of the son he'd disowned!
  
  
  But Alex Gantry was an unknown quantity. Suave and clever, he
  
  
  was too aggressively masculine for his own good.
  
  
  Then why did he affect her as he did? Her own stepson! She'd
  
  
  never felt a physical attraction for any man before. Why this one?
  
  
  **ANNE MATHER** began her career by writing the kind of book
  
  
  she likes to read. Now this north-of-England author has become
  
  
  a worldwide favorite with readers of romance fiction.
  
  
  She knew she should push him away—now!
  
  
  "No wonder Henry was gulled," Alex muttered, his words
  
  
  contradicting the ardor of his embrace. "Even though I know
  
  
  what you are, I can’t help wanting you. How's that for irony?"
  
  
  Ol