Alison Lurie

Offers a meditation on architecture and how it speaks to human experience, looking at what buildings and the spaces they contain say about the people who inhabit them, as well as the effects that those spaces have on them.

how buildings speak to us

The language of houses

Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Secret Garden (Penguin Classics)

Janet Belle Smith visits Illyria, a New England artists' colony, in hopes of improving her writing, and discovers an unexpected chance for a love affair

Real People

PAARE

Nine ghost stories whose central characters are women. They include one who, about to marry, is haunted by the depressed spirit of her fiance's first wife; a secretary on a diet who begins to see fat people everywhere; and a woman whose dead fiance appears to her whenever she kisses another man.

Women and Ghosts

This is another novel by the author of Foreign Affairs.

The Truth about Lorin Jones

Jenny has devoted her life to her husband, the naturalist Wilkie Walker. She is as rare a creature as the endangered species he works to preserve. But this year, as winter comes on, Wilkie seems distant and depressed. In desperation Jenny persuades him to visit Key West, but the sun and tropical scenery do nothing to cheer him up.

The Last Resort

The Truth About Lorin Jones

Frederic J Whiton Professor of American Literature Alison Lurie

Faculty wife Emily Stockwell Turner is beautiful, rich, and principled. However, five years in a marriage devoid of passion is enough to propel Emmy, despite her principles, into an affair with silver-tongued Will Thomas, a self-confessed libertine. The shocking, unforeseen consequences of their affair shatter Emmy's most cherished delusions about friendship, romance, and the ties that bind.

Love and Friendship

The Nowhere City

Like a loyal Victorian wife, Jenny has devoted her life to her much older husband, the famous writer and naturalist Wilkie Walker, bringing up their children and researching and editing his best-selling books. But this year, as winter approaches, Wilkie is increasingly depressed and withdrawn. At her wits' end, Jenny persuades him to visit Key West - the Last Resort. But Key West is not called the Last Resort for nothing. Lives can turn upside down here, and even short-term visitors can have experiences they never imagined. Within weeks of their arrival, Jenny not only has a part-time job but is becoming involved with assorted local characters, including Gerry, an ex-beatnik poet, and Lee, the dramatically attractive manager of a women-only guest house. Wilkie, meanwhile, is planning his own "accidental" death by drowning - a task that turns out to be more difficult than he thought - and trying to avoid the attentions of a breathless young female fan.

Among the results of this intense preoccupation with the occult were a book-length poem, which some critics have called a masterpiece, and the possible destruction of several lives.".

A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson

Familiar Spirits

V. R. Lang

Poems & Plays

Alison

Alan Mackenzie has a very bad back and the pain and discomfort it causes him is ruining his marriage. When a new couple arrive at the same university the wife is both beautiful and charming, but her husband is not. This new couple is about to totally change the lives of Alan and his wife.

Truth and Consequences

Vinnie Miller, a professor of children's literature, and Fred Turner, an assistant professor at the same American university, pursue their separate affairs in London during the same six-month period

Foreign Affairs

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lurie explores children's classics from many eras and relates them to the authors who wrote them--from "Little Women" author Louisa May Alcott to Salman Rushie--and shows how these gifted writers used children's literature to transfigure the struggles of their own experiences.

Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter

Boys and Girls Forever

'Vinnie Miner, 54-year-old Anglophile professor, is in London on a six-month foundation grant. So is her young colleague, Fred Turner. Vinnie is plain and resignedly self-reliant; Fred is arrestingly handsome and moping after a breakup with his wife. Vinnie and Fred have love affairs in London. Fred's is a fraught liaison with a waitress while Vinnie drifts into a relationship with an engineer from Oklahoma she met on the plane, a brash uneducated stereotypical American who finally beguiles her (and the reader) with his uncomplicated goodness... I devoured the book at a sitting and then went back for a second dip at once' Penelope Lively, Sunday Telegraph

A husband’s affair pushes a suburban wife to her breaking point in this “near perfect comedy of manners” by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Real People (The New York Times). Erica Tate wouldn’t mind getting up in the morning if her children were less intolerable. Until puberty struck, Jeffrey and Matilda were absolute darlings, but in the last year, they have become sullen, insufferable little monsters. A forty-year-old housewife out of work and out of mind, she finds little happiness in the small college town of Corinth. Erica’s husband, Brian, a political science professor, is so deeply immersed in university life—or more accurately in the legs of his mistress, a half-literate flower child named Wendy—that he either doesn’t notice his wife’s misery or simply doesn’t care. Worst of all, their pleasant little neighborhood is transforming into a subdivision. As new ranch houses spring up around their once idyllic home, Erica’s marriage inches closer to disaster. When the Tate household tips into full-scale emotional combat, Erica must do her best to ensure that she comes out on top. In this darkly comic tale of a family at civil war, the National Book Award–shortlisted author of Foreign Affairs dives into the deterioration of a marriage. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alison Lurie including rare images from the author’s collection.

A Novel

The War Between the Tates

The author of The War Between the Tates and the Pulitzer prize-winning Foreign Affairs now brings her irresistible wit to the ghost story. In nine spooky tales, Alison Lurie writes of women haunted by ghosts both literal and metaphorical: A woman about to marry Mr. Right is visited by the spirit of his first wife; a dead fiancé haunts a foreign service officer every time she has an intimate moment with another man; the ghost of a girl in a Halloween costume disconcerts the perfect housewife. A secretary on a diet begins to see obese people everywhere she looks; a self-conscious poet is shadowed by her intrusive doppelganger; and a capricious, malevolent spirit seems to have inhabited an acquisitive matron’s prized piece of furniture. Delightfully strange and beautifully told, these nine tales show Alison Lurie at her luminous best.

Alison Lurie

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