Rosenthal is also the author of a minor erotic classic, the 1995 comic SM novel Carrie's Story (written as Molly Weatherfield), which Playboy called No. 12 of its "25 sexiest novels ever written." In addition, she wrote The Bookseller's Daughter, inspired by historian Robert Darnton's The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France about how smuggled political and erotic books were sold "under the cloak" by enterprising booksellers in the late 18th century.
Last but not least, Rosenthal is married to Michael Rosenthal, longtime bookseller at Modern Times bookstore in San Francisco, Calif., who is retiring in September.
Here Rosenthal responds to a series of queries we occasionally ask people in the business:
On nightstand now:
A Manchester Marriage, short stories by Elizabeth Gaskell; Faust, Part I (though I have to admit it's for my book group); Duchess in Love, a romance novel by Eloisa James.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown.
Top five authors:
Proust, Colette, Philip Roth, Jane Austen, Grace Paley
Book you've "faked" reading:
To my shame and sorrow, late one night I skipped to the last page of Joseph Heller's Something Happened, which rendered the book unreadable to me. Take my advice and read it all the way through.
Book you are an "evangelist" for:
Love's Children by Judith Chernaik. A now out-of-print novel about the four women in Shelley's life--Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Harriet Shelley and Fanny Imlay. I read it because I'm fascinated by Claire, who had Byron's baby, probably slept with Shelley, lived a long, bohemian and independent life through the Victorian era but never became a Victorian (unlike her stepsister Mary Shelley). I suppose I'm largely an evangelist for Claire, who's usually, unjustly, dismissed as "annoying." But this beautiful, delicate, thoughtful novel of the imaginative and erotic lives of women in the romantic era gives each woman her due and evokes the sadness and bravery of trying to live far, far in advance of one's own time.
Book you've bought for the cover:
1984, in the '50s Signet paperback, when I was about 11. The woman on the cover with the Ava Gardner cheekbones, the blouse slashed to her waist, and the Anti-Sex League button just screamed SEX to me. And to my (future) husband, too, who bought it around that time as well. We had the cover of his copy framed--as the first erotic perception we shared, far before we ever met.
Book that changed your life:
Story of O dominated my erotic imagination for years (I guess after the 1984 cover stopped doing it for me). After 25 or so years of mulling over it, I wrote the erotic novels Carrie's Story and Safe Word, reworking O as a wiseass San Francisco bicycle messenger.
But I've also got to pay tribute to Liberated Parents, Liberated Children, by Faber and Mazlish--the wisest parenting book I know, even with its goofy '60s-sounding title.
Favorite line from a book:
Vladimir: That passed the time.
Estragon: It would have passed in any case.
--From Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.