Is This What Other Women Feel Too?

June Akers Seese's second novel is about books and the people who read them: it's about a rare-book dealer and his mistress, set in that era when words like "mistress" were still used, and recalling the years when Lenny Bruce, Edith Piaf, and Freud might share the same paragraph in an after-hours night spot. Seese writes movingly, tightly, without recourse to adjectives, from the gut and to the gut.