Few writers today have created more??stir than Daphne Merkin--admired as much for her personal daring on the page as for the wit and power of her prose. Whether writing about the sexual pleasures of spanking (a piece that elicited a storm of response when it appeared in The New Yorker), losing her religion, her obsession with rock 'n' roll, her own failed marriage, or other vexed subjects, she is always tough-minded, compulsively readable, and at...