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In this brilliant, luminous novel, one of our finest realist writers gives us a story of surpassing depth and emotional power. Acclaimed for her lucid and compassionate exploration of the American family, Roxana Robinson sets her new work on familiar terrain—New York City and the Adirondacks—but with Sweetwater she transcends the particulars of the domestic sphere with a broader, more encompassing vision. In this poignant account of a young widow and her second marriage, Robinson expands her scope to include the larger natural world as well as the smaller, more intimate one of the home. Isabel Green’s marriage to Paul Simmons, after the death of her first husband, marks her reconnectio...
A New York Times Notable Book: A luminous, deeply affecting story of divorce, remarriage, and parenthood. Peter and Emma, two single parents who have found love again after failed first marriages, dream of a peaceful and happy blended family with each of their daughters under one roof. They navigate this treacherous territory with the best of intentions, but face resistance from the girls, who, like many children of divorce, find their relationships tinged by grief, anger, and resentment. Emma’s three-year-old daughter, Tess, takes to the arrangement while Amanda, Peter’s sullen and unhappy seven-year-old, views it as a disaster rather than a fresh start. Over the course of this emotional powerhouse of a novel, Amanda becomes increasingly hostile and alienated—until one night she commits an act that threatens the already fragile bonds of the fledgling family. Set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, This Is My Daughter is a skillful and sensitive portrayal of the challenges facing modern families from master of the contemporary novel Roxana Robinson, whose acute observations of domestic life invite comparison to John Cheever and Henry James.
When Julia Lambert, an art professor, settles into her idyllic Maine house for the summer, she plans to spend the time tending her fragile relationships with her father, a repressive neurosurgeon, and her gentle mother, who is descending into Alzheimer's. But a shattering revelation intrudes: Julia's son Jack has spiraled into heroin addiction. In an attempt to save him, Julia marshals help from her loose knit clan: elderly parents; remarried ex-husband; removed sister; and combative eldest son. Ultimately, heroin courses through the characters' lives with an impersonal and devastating energy, sweeping the family into a world in which deceit, crime, and fear are part of daily life.
Conrad has just returned home to Westchester after four years in Iraq, and something is very wrong. As he attempts to reconnect with his girlfriend and find his footing in the civilian world, he has an impossible time adjusting. As weeks turn into months, his estrangement increases.
Georgia O'Keeffe is one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. Coming of age during the rise of American modernism, O'Keeffe led a life rich in intense relationships – with the great ferment of ideas in modern art, with family, friends and especially noted photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who became her husband. In her work she drew on abstraction, modernism, photography and Asian sources, producing a body of work both powerful and unique. The images she created – the red hills, the magnified flowers, the great crosses and white bones – are irrevocably hers and known throughout the world. She was a natural feminist, and hailed as a heroine by the wave of Feminism of the 1970s. This biography, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, draws on many sources closed to writers during O'Keeffe's lifetime and the author was given the co-operation of the O'Keeffe family and access to the letters between the artist and her circle.
A Maine vacation forces a young woman to challenge her own understanding of the world in a sharply insightful first novel
In Roxana Robinson’s lucid and elegant prose, her characters’ inner worlds open up to us, revealing private emotional cores that are familiar in their needs, their secrets, and their longings. These people tell us the truth–not only about themselves, their relationships, and their lives, but about ourselves as well. In “Family Christmas,” a young girl takes a holiday trip to her grandparents’, where the formal atmosphere is shattered by a mysterious and chaotic event that she knows she’s too young to understand but struggles to comprehend. In “Blind Man,” a college professor copes with the onslaught of grief after his daughter’s death. In “The Face Lift,” two college ...
What does love demand of us, and who must pay the price? 'Absorbing...haunting.' Meg Woltizer, author of The Wife High school sweethearts, Sarah and Warren, have grand plans for an adventurous future together, but when a misunderstanding causes them to part ways, they end up marrying other people. When they meet again at sixty, their lives have been carved into very different shapes. Sarah lives outside New York; Warren lives in Boston. Sarah is divorced, Warren still married, and both have grown up children. When they reconnect, they feel the rekindled spark of love and desire - a spark that has been dead for so long. But are they willing to risk destroying all that they have built separately for the chance of a future together? ‘Classic... I’d read any story she has to tell.’ Amity Gage, New York Times ‘Smart, seductive.’ Daily Mail
A cinematic Reconstruction-era drama of violence and fraught moral reckoning In Dawson’s Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape. Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states’ rights. He later became th...
Short stories of upper-class domestic life by an award-winning literary talent: “Asking for Love delighted me no end” (Alice Munro). Whether it’s a woman who must accept the reality of her son growing up, or a daughter becoming disillusioned with her father, this moving collection expertly conveys the joys, doubts, fears, and endless contradictions that are inescapable parts of domestic life. In “Mr. Sumarsono,” included in The Best American Short Stories of 1994, a visiting Indonesian diplomat brings out the confidence and charm in a suburban divorcée, much to the surprise of her two young daughters; and in “Leaving Home” a teenage girl, stifled by her family’s rigid sense ...