Annotator's Note
by Tom Bradley

At the end of her life, Carol Novack was doing what must eventually be done by everyone who's strong enough: she was squarely facing certain aspects of herself, her family, and her heritage that were not precisely excruciating, but, as she said, were interesting and worthy of painstaking examination.

Even before the cancer diagnosis, she was tallying up her life's debits and credits, in particular the wheels and deals with Muter. The penultimate chapter of Felicia s Nose is a confrontation between the eponymous heroine and...