Lisa Alther

Meet Ginny Babcock - the forerunner to BRIDGET JONES It's the 1950's and 60's in Hullsport, Tennessee and Ginny Babcock is coming of age. Bouncing from one identity to the other, she adopts the values, politics, lifestyles and even sexual orientation of each new partner she finds. In this wise, funny and ultimately heartbreaking story, Lisa Alther explores the limited roles offered to women in this period - from cheerleader to motorcycle moll, bulldyke to madonna - each embodying important truths about the aspirations of the culture that created them. Honest, wise, funny and tragic by turns this is a remarkable novel in a class of its own.

Kinflicks

"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Copyright page.

An Odyssey

Swan Song

Discusses the long-running feud between the two families, beginning with a Civil War era murder, through thefts, home burnings, and multiple killings up to the 1890s and the impact the feud had on popular imagination and other feuds in the region.

The Hatfields and the McCoys : the Epic Story of Murder and Vengeance

Blood Feud

"Original Sins," Alther's second novel, begins like "Kinflicks" in a small town in Tennessee, but instead of recounting the life and loves of one character, this broad-canvas book follows five characters from childhood into adulthood. They called themselves "The Five" and spent their childhoods trading dreams in the branches of the Castle Tree. They were convinced that they were special -- and they were, even though their dreams did not work out quite as they had hoped they would. Once they enter high school, the ties that bind them together begin to dissolve. And what happens to them through twenty years of growing up is just about everything they had and had not dreamed of. In "Original Sins," Alther brings to life not only the passions of her characters, but the fantasies and follies of an entire generation. Library Journal, in praising the novel, notes that Lisa Alther "tackles big topics and handles them deftly; the novel is in turn a moving evocation of childhood, a send-up of 1960s high school life, a satire on Southern rednecks and Northern liberals, and, fundamentally, a lyric, ironic, bittersweet tale of the South." Time magazine called the book "an old-fashioned novel in the best sense of the term. It propels singular, interesting characters through a panoramic plot."

Original Sins

With two young sons, a failed marriage, a job as an emergency room nurse that leaves her feeling paralyzed and hopeless, and a relationship with a woman that has entered its bitter final stages, thirty-five-year-old Caroline Kelley is more than ready to change her life. Motherhood, marriage, monogamy, bigamy, polygamy, consumerism, communism, feminism, sex, work, alcohol, drugs, and true love: Caroline has done it all, and now she's at the end of her rope. She's reached the conclusion that only two choices remain: suicide or psychotherapy. Being a realist and, despite it all, a devoted mother, she chooses the latter. At the center of Alther's third novel is Caroline Kelley's wrenching, painfully funny attempt to get her life back on track in her therapy sessions with Dr. Hannah Burke -- a brilliant woman who is forced to reexamine her own demons in order to help Caroline. "Other Women" is Alther's quietest novel, but also her most psychologically acute. The San Francisco Chronicle called the book "powerful, tender and wry...Alther's genius as a novelist is her ability to capture and juxtapose the odd combinations of personality, gender, class, culture, family life and chance that shape human destinies."

Other Women

Francoise Gilot

A provocative and wide-ranging conversation between two distinctive women--one American and one French--on the dilemmas, benefits, and demands of womanhood. Lisa Alther and FranCoise Gilot have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Although from different backgrounds (Gilot from cosmopolitan Paris, Alther from small-town Tennessee) and different generations, they found they have a great deal in common as women who managed to support themselves with careers in the arts while simultaneously balancing the obligations of work and parenthood. "About Women "is their extended conversation, in which they talk about everything important to them: their childhoods, the impact of war on their lives and their work, fashion, self-invention, style, feminism, even child rearing. They also talk about the creative impulse and the importance of art. This is a charming and endearing dialogue between two intelligent and often funny women as they ponder what it means to be a woman.

Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter

About Women

Caroline is a giver—as an ER nurse, as devoted lover to her partner, Diane, as a divorced mother of two boys, and as the daughter of world-class do-gooders—but can she accept help from others and still be herself? When trauma cases in the ER leave Caroline emotionally paralyzed and her relationship with her partner, Diane, breaks down, she knows its time to take a look at her life and do something she’d never imagined: go to therapy. Her therapist, Hannah, knows a thing or two about sacrifice and pain. A former war bride, Hannah may live a seemingly cozy domestic life with her beloved husband and two grown children, but she can’t forget her own harrowing past. As she and Caroline work together, each comes to understand and admire the resilient woman sitting before her. A poignant look at the human need for acceptance, Other Women is a thoughtful novel about how a life examined is worth living. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lisa Alther, including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

The author looks for her father's family in Virginia. They may have belonged to a mysterious group known as the Melungeons.

Falling Off the Family Tree

Kinfolks

A humorous journey from ’80s Manhattan to the wild side of small-town living, from bestselling author Lisa Alther Clea Shawn is exhausted by her life: her globe-trotting career as a travel photographer, her successful husband’s numerous liaisons, and the unrequited love she feels for her best friend, Elke. She decides to get away from her Manhattan townhouse—and a city in the throws of the ’80s—and move to Roches Ridge, the picturesque Vermont town she visits on a ski trip. Roches Ridge is quiet, sleepy, and seemingly unchanged by the times. But Clea soon discovers this small town has big secrets—and even bigger characters. From the Don Johnson look-alike who introduces his salon’s clientele to punk hairstyles and the band of militant lesbians camped out in Mink Creek to the romance-writing cosmetics saleswoman turned stalker and the strapping hillbilly with a predilection for animal skeleton art, Roches Ridge is livelier than Clea originally thinks. . . . A rollicking small-town adventure, Bedrock features Alther’s signature mix of unexpected, humorous characters, and a charming heroine on the long bumpy road to self-actualization. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lisa Alther, including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Bedrock

Five childhood friends with big plans face the changing realities of life in Tennessee in the 1960s in this novel from bestselling author Lisa Alther As Sally and Emily Prince and Jed, Raymond, and Donny Tatro sit under their beloved Castle Tree in rural, segregated Tennessee, they dream big dreams. But the journey from these dreams to reality is a long one. As they move into their teens, each faces challenges they could never have imagined. Sally and Jed may take a traditional route as head cheerleader and football captain in their sports-frenzied town, but can their love survive some unexpected bumps in the road? Emily and Raymond, always the outsiders, move north during the civil rights movement and must consider their connection to Southern roots and traditional gender roles. And Donny, as an African-American teen, will endure the effects of generations of discrimination and class boundaries as he tries to live out his dreams in their small factory town. Along the way, the five will fall in love, change one another’s lives, grow apart, and come together again. In this sweeping novel, Alther brings to life characters both tragic and comic as they live through the changing American socio-economic landscape of the 1950s and ’60s. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lisa Alther, including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

In Kinflicks, Lisa Alther reels through the ups and downs of Ginny Babcock's coming of age in Hullsport, Tennessee, during the '50s and '60s. Ginny bounces from one identity to another, adopting the values, politics, lifestyle, even the sexual orientation of each new partner. In her wise, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking story, Alther explores the limited roles offered to women in the '60s - from cheerleader to motorcycle moll, bulldyke to madonna - each embodying important truths about the aspirations of the culture that created them.

A Novel

America’s most notorious family feud began in 1865 with the murder of a Union McCoy soldier by a Confederate Hatfield relative of "Devil Anse" Hatfield. More than a decade later, Ranel McCoy accused a Hatfield cousin of stealing one of his hogs, triggering years of violence and retribution, including a Romeo-and-Juliet interlude that eventually led to the death of one of McCoy’s daughters. In a drunken brawl, three of McCoy's sons killed Devil Anse Hatfield’s younger brother. Exacting vigilante vengeance, a group of Hatfields tied them up and shot them dead. McCoy posses hijacked part of the Hatfield firing squad across state lines to stand trial, while those still free burned down Ranel McCoy’s cabin and shot two of his children in a botched attempt to suppress the posses. Legal wrangling ensued until the US Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky could try the captured West Virginian Hatfields. Seven went to prison, and one, mentally disabled, yelled, “The Hatfields made me do it!” as he was hanged. But the feud didn’t end there. Its legend continues to have an enormous impact on the popular imagination and the region. With a charming voice, a wonderfully dry sense of humor, and an abiding gift for spinning a yarn, bestselling author Lisa Alther makes an impartial, comprehensive, and compelling investigation of what happened, masterfully setting the feud in its historical and cultural contexts, digging deep into the many causes and explanations of the fighting, and revealing surprising alliances and entanglements. Here is a fascinating new look at the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud.

The Hatfields and the McCoys: The Epic Story of Murder and Vengeance

A wise and funny novel about the kind of love that extends beyond boundaries—within this world and into the next Raised in the Tennessee hills in the 1950s by a widower father, Jude grows into a young woman who finds her soul mate in her new neighbor Molly. But when age and social convention intervene, she must find a new person to entrust with her heart. Venturing north to pursue all that ’60s New York has to offer, Jude finds comfort in her childhood pal Sandy, a man now in the midst of his own metamorphosis. Will she give her love to Sandy, or will the attractive and mysterious poet Anna be her true match? With an endearing heroine and a keen understanding of the human condition, Alther’s smart and captivating tale considers how changing views on what it means to love—and be loved—can alter lives. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lisa Alther, including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Five Minutes in Heaven

Most of us grow up knowing who we are and where we come from. Lisa Alther’s mother hailed from New York, her father from Virginia. One day a babysitter told Lisa about the Melungeons: six-fingered child-snatchers who hid in caves. Forgetting about these creepy kidnappers until she had a daughter of her own, Lisa learned they were actually an isolated group of dark-skinned people—often with extra thumbs—living in East Tennessee. But who were they? Descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony? Kin of shipwrecked Portuguese or Turkish sailors? Or were they the children of frontiersman, or displaced Native Americans? Part sidesplitting travelogue, part how (and how not) to climb your family tree, Alther’s Kinfolks casts light on a little-known part of America’s contentious racial history; it shimmers with wicked humor, dazzles with wit, and demonstrates just how wacky and wonderful our human family truly is.

Lisa Alther

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