Mary Gordon

"The beloved author at her storytelling best: four wonderful novellas of Americans abroad and Europeans in America. In these absorbing and exquisitely made novellas of relationships at home and abroad, both historical and contemporary, we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her final days as a transplant to New York City; a vulnerable American grad student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of...

Three masterful tales of women in the grips of complicated and dangerous loves The Rest of Life is comprised of three spellbinding novellas about women in love. In Immaculate Man, an agnostic New York divorcée finds herself in thrall to an unexpected passion for a Catholic priest-who is also desired by a former superior-and who becomes unmoored by the affair. Living at Home is set in London, and depicts the strange union between an English woman-a...

"From the award-winning, much loved writer: a deeply moving novel about an American woman's place during the Spanish Civil War, the lessons she took from it, and how her story will shape her granddaughter's path. Marian cut herself off from her conservative, wealthy Irish Catholic family when she volunteered during the Spanish Civil War--experiences she has always kept to herself. Now in her nineties, she shares her Rhode Island cottage with her granddaughter...

A book of profound and candid stories by one of America's best novelists Temporary Shelter is a collection of twenty expertly crafted short stories by Mary Gordon. The characters here are of diverse ages, classes, and nationalities, yet all are alike in their desperate need of safe harbor. A crippled girl must contend not only with disability, but also with her toxic mother and aunts, who block her on the path to maturity. Elsewhere, a woman afflicted...

A collection of dazzling and thought-provoking essays from lauded author Mary Gordon Much acclaimed for her novels, Mary Gordon is also a brilliant and wide-ranging essayist. Gathering together twenty-eight of her forays into nonfiction, Good Boys and Dead Girls provides a richly autobiographical context for the themes that mark her fiction, such as Irish-American life, Catholicism, embattled families, and the redeeming power of art. Many of the pieces...

"Unbeknownst to her many fans, Quin Archer, the revenge-loving queen of the reality-TV show "Payback," was once an angry teen named Heidi - and her true story may be known only to Agnes, who was her art teacher at a private New England girls' school in the 1970s. Then a young woman herself, Agnes saw a spark of originality in the brooding Heidi. But when she suggests Heidi visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the girl returns with a disastrous...

Considered by many to be E.M. Forster's greatest novel, Howards End is a beautifully subtle tale of two very different families brought together by an unusual event. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes are practical and materialistic, leading lives of "telegrams and anger." When the elder Mrs. Wilcox dies and her family discovers she has left their country home-Howards End-to one of the Schlegel sisters, a...

An exploration of Thomas Merton, who became the face and voice of mid-twentieth-century American Catholicism. Approaching Merton "writer to writer," Gordon illuminates his life and work through his letters, journals, autobiography, and fiction--Adapted from jacket.