Greetings, mortals. I am Artemis, Goddess of the hunt. My powers extend to chastity, protecting women, and also, to a lesser extent, cage fighting. Therefore, I am proud to welcome you to the first of what I hope will be many installments of my new column, “Literary Ladies Cage Fight!” I thought that, in this post-9/11 dystopian world, what mortals really needed was a new kind of heroine, someone who…what’s that? You’ve heard I’ve been…

The moment Kurt Vonnegut entered my life is seared indelibly in my memory. It stands out starkly, like my first period or my first kiss. All of those memories share a common theme: afterwards, my life was forever changed. I was thirteen, and my friend’s unusually permissive mother left me unsupervised in her well-stocked library. I don’t know why I pulled Mother Night off the shelves. The cover was black with a picture of…

In the BBC’s recent adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes saga, Sherlock, Irene Adler deliciously croons “brainy is the new sexy.” She is referring, of course, to the show’s titular character, magnificently brought to life by Benedict Cumberbatch. His Sherlock is tall, dark, and handsome—brilliant and sneeringly superior, yet totally irresistible. Cumberbatch’s turn as Sherlock and his entire body of work are critically acclaimed and voraciously loved because he has tapped into a vein of the…