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"Elizabeth Brown
Preferred a book
To going on a date.

While friends went out
And danced till dawn,
She stayed up reading late."
— The Library by Sarah Stewart

The Dancer Upstairs Nicholas Shakespeare is a talented award-winning British author. The 1995 fiction he wrote is based upon the manhunt and capture (in 1992) of Abimael Guzman, the leader of Peru's violent guerilla organization, The Shining Path. The author's antagonist is Ezequiel, actually "the dancer upstairs," or, more accurately, the choreographer of violence and chaos. Rejas, the policeman/pursuer is a very sympathetic and complete character who possesses the most admired trait of humankind. In the end, he is the one who loses the most. He won the battle, but lost the war. He is Peru, and, as one critic remarked, Everyman. It is impossible to separate the cold political from the agonizing personal. Everything and everyone is as tightly intertwined as a Peruvian highland cap, and, as the narrator's aunt remarks at the end: "What they say about her is true. Love is eternal for as long as it lasts."—KRM

Editor's note: Nicholas Shakespeare adapted The Dancer Upstairs to film. The 2002 release is directed by John Malkovich and stars Javier Bardem.

Almost a decade before Truman Capote introduced Holly Golightly to literary society, he created eerie Miriam, the titular character in a short story published in A Tree of Night and Other Stories, 1949:

"Her long hair was the longest and strangest Mrs. Miller had ever seen: absolutely silver-white, like an albino's. It flowed waist-length in smooth, loose lines. She was thin and fragiley constructed. There was a special elegance in the way she stood with her thumbs in the pockets if a tailored plum-velvet coat. . . . She touched a paper rose in a vase on the coffee table. "Imitation," she commented wanly. "How sad. Aren't imitations sad?"

Next to Truman Capote's unique writings, imitations can only pale.—KMH