Eleanor Henderson

Adopted by a pair of diehard hippies, restless, marginal Jude Keffy-Horn spends much of his youth getting high with his best friend, Teddy, in their bucolic and deeply numbing Vermont town. But when Teddy dies of an overdose on the last day of 1987, Jude's relationship with drugs and with his parents devolves to new extremes. Sent to live with his pot-dealing father in New York City's East Village, Jude stumbles upon straight edge, an underground youth culture powered by the paradoxical aggression of hardcore punk and a righteous intolerance for drugs, meat, and sex. With Teddy's half brother, Johnny, and their new friend, Eliza, Jude tries to honor Teddy's memory through his militantly clean lifestyle. But his addiction to straight edge has its own dangerous consequences. While these teenagers battle to discover themselves, their parents struggle with this new generation's radical reinterpretation of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll and their grown-up awareness of nature and nurture, brotherhood and loss. Moving back and forth between Vermont and New York City, Ten Thousand Saints is an emphatically observed story of a frayed tangle of family members brought painfully together by a death, then carried along in anticipation of a new and unexpected life. With empathy and masterful skill, Eleanor Henderson has conjured a rich portrait of the modern age and the struggles that unite and divide generations.

A Novel

Ten Thousand Saints

A turbulent romance meets harrowing medical mystery, Eleanor Henderson's Everything I Have Is Yours is the true story of a twenty-year marriage defined by the author’s husband’s physical and mental illness and a testament to the enduring power of love. Eleanor met Aaron when she was just a teenager and he was working at a local record store—older, cool, experienced, and with an electric personality. Escaping the clichés of fleeting young love, their summer romance bloomed into a relationship that survived college and culminated in a marriage and two children. From the outside looking in, their life had all the trappings of what most would consider a success story. But, like any marriage, things weren’t always as they seemed. When Aaron one day began complaining about burning rashes, Eleanor tried desperately to help. And when the rashes gave way to Aaron’s increasingly paranoid concerns about parasites living inside him, nonplussed doctors were at a loss. Whatever Aaron had was a mystery, but it also wasn’t getting better. In fact, it was mutating. There seemed to be no obvious diagnosis, and as the man she loved began to deteriorate before her eyes, so began Eleanor’s tireless quest for answers in an effort to help her husband at any cost. Emotional, propulsive, and at times heartbreaking, Everything I Have Is Yours tells the story of a marriage tested by powerful forces out of both partners’ control. It’s a memoir not just of a wife who would do anything to save the man she loves, but one that asks just what it means to accept someone as they are—as well as the sacrifices one chooses to make in the name of love.

A Marriage

Everything I Have Is Yours

From New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Henderson, an audacious American epic set in rural Georgia during the years of the Depression and Prohibition. Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: in a house full of secrets, two babies-one light-skinned, the other dark-are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper’s daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm’s inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured. Despite the prying eyes and curious whispers of the townspeople, Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her mercurial father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper who is as close to Elma as a sister. But soon it becomes clear that the ties that bind all of them together are more intricate than any could have ever imagined. As startling revelations mount, a web of lies begins to collapse around the family, destabilizing their precarious world and forcing all to reckon with the painful truth. Acclaimed author Eleanor Henderson has returned with a novel that combines the intimacy of a family drama with the staggering presence of a great Southern saga. Tackling themes of racialized violence, social division, and financial crisis, The Twelve-Mile Straight is a startlingly timely, emotionally resonant, and magnificent tour de force.

The Twelve-Mile Straight

*NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE* *An Entertainment Weekly "Must-Read" Book for Fall* From New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Henderson, an audacious American epic set in rural Georgia during the years of the Depression and Prohibition. Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: in a house full of secrets, two babies-one light-skinned, the other dark-are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper’s daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm’s inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured. Despite the prying eyes and curious whispers of the townspeople, Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her mercurial father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper who is as close to Elma as a sister. But soon it becomes clear that the ties that bind all of them together are more intricate than any could have ever imagined. As startling revelations mount, a web of lies begins to collapse around the family, destabilizing their precarious world and forcing all to reckon with the painful truth. Acclaimed author Eleanor Henderson has returned with a novel that combines the intimacy of a family drama with the staggering presence of a great Southern saga. Tackling themes of racialized violence, social division, and financial crisis, The Twelve-Mile Straight is a startlingly timely, emotionally resonant, and magnificent tour de force.

In the roiling, electrified streets of New York City in the 1980s, Eliza, Jude, and Johnny each show up wanting a place to hide—from everything that has gone wrong, big and small, in their short lives. These three, thrown together by their parents’ mistakes and their own, and by the accidental death of a teenage boy, find their regrets transformed into a single, covert mission. Possibility shines from every neglected, graffitied surface. Possibility rings in the hardcore music and seething energy of the city’s underground scene. But as they pursue the intoxicating promise of redemption and new life, their secret threatens to crush their alliance with its impossibly heavy burden.

Ten thousand saints

“Eleanor Henderson is in possession of an enormous talent which she has matched up with skill, ambition, and a fierce imagination. The resulting novel, Ten Thousand Saints, is the best thing I’ve read in a long time.” —Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder A sweeping, multigenerational drama, set against the backdrop of the raw, roaring New York City during the late 1980s, Ten Thousand Saints triumphantly heralds the arrival a remarkable new writer. Eleanor Henderson makes a truly stunning debut with a novel that is part coming of age, part coming to terms, immediately joining the ranks of The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. Adoption, teen pregnancy, drugs, hardcore punk rock, the unbridled optimism and reckless stupidity of the young—and old—are all major elements in this heart-aching tale of the son of diehard hippies and his strange odyssey through the extremes of late 20th century youth culture.

STUDENT'S GUIDE: THE TEMPEST: The Tempest - A William Shakespeare Play, with Study Guide *A Student's Guide *Full study materials and discussion *Key scenes, quotes and study questions *Plus original text Full play with Student's Guide, from the Literature Unpacked series. Make sense of William Shakespeare's classic play with full study notes, including characters, plot, themes, key scenes, important quotes and suggested study questions. Unpack the complexities of Shakespeare with the accompanying text to this play - ideal for students and scholars of all ages.

The Tempest - a William Shakespeare Play, with Study Guide

Student's Guide: the Tempest

Anna Solomon

A collection of personal childbirth stories by 30 acclaimed writers, edited by the authors of Ten Thousand Saints and The Little Bride, includes entries by such contributors as Julia Glass, Lauren Groff and Dani Shapiro. 50,000 first printing.

Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers

Thirty acclaimed writers share their personal birth stories—the extraordinary, the ordinary, the terrifying, the sublime, the profane It's an elemental, almost animalistic urge—the expectant mother's hunger for birth narratives. Bookstores are filled with month-by-month pregnancy manuals, but the shelves are virtually empty of artful, entertaining, unvarnished accounts of labor and delivery—the stories that new mothers need most. Here is a book that transcends the limits of how-to guides and honors the act of childbirth in the twenty-first century. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon have gathered true birth stories by women who have made self-expression their business, including Cheryl Strayed, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and many other luminaries. In Labor Day, you'll read about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to ten-pound babies. These women give birth in the hospital, at home, in bathtubs, and, yes, even in the car. Some revel in labor, some fear labor, some feel defeated by labor, some are fulfilled by it—and all are amazed by it. You will laugh, weep, squirm, perhaps groan in recognition, and undoubtedly gasp with surprise. And then you'll call every mother or mother-to-be that you know and say "You MUST read Labor Day." Contributors: Nuar Alsadir Amy Brill Susan Burton Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Lan Samantha Chang Phoebe Damrosch Claire Dederer Jennifer Gilmore Julia Glass Arielle Greenberg Lauren Groff Eleanor Henderson Cristina Henriquez Amy Herzog Ann Hood Sarah Jefferis Heidi Julavits Mary Beth Keane Marie Myung-Ok Lee Edan Lepucki Heidi Pitlor Joanna Rakoff Jane Roper Danzy Senna Dani Shapiro Anna Solomon Cheryl Strayed Sarah A. Strickley Rachel Jamison Webster Gina Zucker

Eleanor Henderson

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