TBR

Inside the List

By GREGORY COWLES

Published: January 20, 2012

FEMALE POWER: Jayne Ann Krentz’s latest paranormal romance, “Copper Beach,” is new on the hardcover fiction list at No. 8. Krentz is no stranger to this page — she’s had more than 30 New York Times best sellers — and with her success she has become a vocal defender of the romance category as a whole. In interviews, she talks about the genre’s link to the “heroic tradition,” and as far back as 1992 she edited a cultural studies anthology, “Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women,” in which she argued that romances were by nature both feminist and subversive: “Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel … the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male, to his knees.”