Hortense Calisher
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In the vein of Eudora Welty and Charles Dickens, Hortense Calisher's astounding first novel examines a young man's detachment from the world-and his struggle to rejoin it Pierre Goodman enjoys an idyllic childhood as the son of a widowed dressmaker in post–World War I England. But paradise is ripped from him at age ten when he and his mother immigrate to a small town in Alabama. Yearning to regain peace within his own mind and aided by his photographic...
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A cheeky portrait of an old-fashioned young woman's assimilation into the modern world Set in 1960s New York, this piquant coming-of-age story concerns a teenage girl, Queenie, raised to become a "kept woman" in an exceedingly comfortable and well-adjusted-yet insular and retrograde-household. After enrolling in college, Queenie confronts new understandings, both personal and political, and gradually becomes cognizant of the dated values imparted...
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A finely observed and lovingly detailed portrait of a woman attempting to find a community and understand her own troubled history After spending two decades in jails, psych wards, and halfway houses for her peripheral involvement in a radical students' bombing plot, thirty-six-year-old Carol Smith winds up squatting in a tattered space in Spanish Harlem. She spends the majority of her vagrant days socializing with her homeless neighbors, arguing...
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Hortense Calisher's evocative memoir bristles with intelligence and youthful inquiry Kissing Cousins recalls the author as a teenager: peppy, earnest, and a bit self-important. Hortense Calisher documents her family's surprising history as Southern Jews adrift in New York. Finding her new city and school boorish, the young Calisher takes solace in the enduring friendship she develops with Katie Pyle, a gregarious nurse turned "kissing cousin" fifteen...
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A study in motives, conflicts, ambitions, and fears as idealistic young newlyweds face unanticipated realities Hortense Calisher's second novel is a multigenerational story of art, family, and marriage. Opening with Liz and David's wedding and chronicling the first four years of their life together, Calisher follows the couple through their evolution into erudite, antimaterialist artists. They move into a sparse downtown Manhattan loft, prideful of...
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A novel that examines aging and marriage with sincerity and insight Rupert and Gemma, an elderly couple still very much in love, know that death will inevitably come for one of them before taking the other, so they keep private journals to ensure that the survivor's mate will never truly be gone, living on instead through his or her words. Age is the narrative of Rupert and Gemma's lives: their similarities, their differences, and the ways in which...
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Two novellas from award-winning author Hortense Calisher offering very different journeys: the first looking hopefully forward, and the second, into a painful past The characters in these two novellas take introspective, poignant excursions both to where they want to be (The Railway Police) and where they have been (The Last Trolley Ride). In the first, a woman with hereditary premature baldness decides to embrace her unadorned head and hopes to start...
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A unique novel of parents and children-and the spaces between them Dr. Niels Berners-a Swiss plastic surgeon living in New York-is struggling to recover from his dysfunctional son's abandonment of him. He joins a group of four other parents, all with absent children either in jail or in jeopardy, to discuss their feelings and seek a sense of community, comfort, and closure. Hortense Calisher artfully strings together tales of healing, brilliantly...
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The recognition of failure and success is the theme of these eight short stories and the title novella from three-time National Book Award finalist Hortense Calisher Extreme Magic is Hortense Calisher's third collection of shorter works, after In the Absence of Angels (1951) and Tale for the Mirror (1962). Follow a drifting husband as he returns home and finds middle age in "A Christmas Carillon." Listen with a daughter as she overhears a painful...
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The debut short story collection that launched the career of one of the twentieth century's most vivid writers, featuring the celebrated tale "In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks" In this captivating collection of fifteen short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker, Hortense Calisher's lyrical prose captures the quotidian lives of individuals dealing with alienation, loneliness, and assimilation. Highly influenced by her...
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Finalist for the National Book Award: Thirty-six stories by O. Henry Award–winning novelist Hortense Calisher The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher gathers short pieces that chart the author's best-loved themes of mindful consciousness and social worlds. This collection includes one of her well-known New Yorker stories, "In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks," in which a young man drops his mother off at a sanitarium and acquires a new...
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A complex masterpiece that reveals the mind of a contemporary woman beyond the confines of family, love, and duty to one's self Lexie, a married woman with four children, undergoes a midlife crisis and questions her role as wife, mother, and lover. From within a Victorian house in the Hudson River Valley, Lexie dissects her life experiences in hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of her unhappiness. Through rich symbolism, lively dialogue, and...
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Hortense Calisher's complex exploration of the journey of a young man whose intelligent observations cannot help him figure out his own direction Returning home to New York from Europe on his twenty-first birthday, draft-dodging narrator Bunty Bronstein is frustrated with his increasingly pompous businessman father and his disaffected mother, who no longer shows the flame she once possessed. Equipped with an incisive view of bourgeois lifestyles in...
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Hortense Calisher's excursion into science fiction: A rich portrait of the passengers aboard the first civilian space shuttle The Citizen Courier is headed toward Island US, "the first public habitat in space." Aboard the ship resides a collection of diverse travelers. Narrator Tom Gilpin is a rich publisher, and he's joined by fellow journalist Veronica, as well as an industrialist, a Jewish-German expatriate philosopher, a diplomat and his wife,...
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A sprawling, multicharacter masterpiece of guilt and the hope for redemption Opening in 1943 and spanning over a decade, The New Yorkers is Hortense Calisher's most ambitious novel. Judge Simon Mannix, a well-educated upper-middle-class New Yorker, is faced with a terrible decision when his unfaithful wife is accidentally shot and killed by their twelve-year-old daughter. Mannix insists upon keeping the truth a secret, claiming that the death was...
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A National Book Award nominee: Hortense Calisher's autobiography captures the making of a distinct literary voice Although Hortense Calisher's fiction often draws on autobiographical elements, Herself is a disciplined documentation of the award-winning author's life and work. She surveys the various decades and landscapes she has inhabited, mining her family's Jewish lineage, discussing her children, exploring her greatest artistic influences, and...
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Hortense Calisher's revelatory novel of celebrity, small-town values, and a young woman's coming of age Famous playwright Craig Towle has decided to return to his New Jersey hometown, a suburb of New York City. He arrives with his world-renowned reputation and a new wife who is half his age. It is the 1950s, and the new couple raises plenty of eyebrows-in particular, those of the narrator, an adolescent girl who is full of observations, but not judgments....
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A humorous satire and loving tribute to science fiction that delves into the tenuous relationship between science and the humanities by asking, What does it mean to be human? A genderless alien from Ellipsia, a planet whose inhabitants have no concept of individuality, comes to Earth on an intergalactic exchange program to learn how to become human. To live here, the traveler must study and understand our inclinations for seeing people as distinct...
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Hortense Calisher delivers another collection of provocative prose, on par with that of Henry James and John Updike A novella plus twelve short vignettes, Tale for the Mirror demonstrates Hortense Calisher's masterful use of language in an exploration of the human condition. In the title novella, a suburban man in the Hudson River Valley analyzes his life and discovers the importance of stories after a sage Indian mystic moves into his neighborhood....