Roxana Robinson

This biography draws on many sources closed to writers during O'Keeffe's lifetime and has the co-operation of the O'Keeffe family. Her life spanned nearly a century of ferment and change in America and although part of the modernist movement she established her own unique vision. She was deeply influenced by feminist thought, having experience the early suffrage movement before World War I. During the next wave of feminist thought in the seventies, she was hailed as a heroine.

A Life

Georgia O'Keeffe

A gripping, powerful novel from one of our most accomplished storytellers, Leaving is a searing portrait of love and obligation in the second half of life.

Leaving

Hoping to reconnect with her repressive neurosurgeon father and Alzheimer's patient mother during a summer in Maine, art professor Julia Lambert is shattered by her son's heroin addiction and marshals help from their scattered family in order to save him, with unexpected results. Reprint.

A Novel

Cost

Sweetwater

Sparta

A cinematic Reconstruction-era drama of violence and fraught moral reckoning In Dawson’s Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape. Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states’ rights. He later became the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, finding a platform of real influence in the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South. With his wife and two children, he tried to lead a life that adhered to his staunch principles: equal rights, rule of law, and nonviolence, unswayed by the caprices of popular opinion. But he couldn’t control the political whims of his readers. As he wrangled diligently in his columns with questions of citizenship, equality, justice, and slavery, his newspaper rapidly lost readership, and he was plagued by financial worries. Nor could Dawson control the whims of the heart: his Swiss governess became embroiled in a tense affair with a drunkard doctor, which threatened to stain his family’s reputation. In the end, Dawson—a man in many ways representative of the country at this time—was felled by the very violence he vehemently opposed.

Dawson's Fall

Settling into her parents' home in Maine in the hopes of helping them with their respective health challenges, art professor Julie Lambert is shattered by the discovery of her son's heroin addiction, a situation for which mother and son receive help from multiple family members.

A Maine vacation forces a young woman to challenge her own understanding of the world in a sharply insightful first novel.

Summer Light

This is without question the best book ever written on O'Keeffe' New Yorker Born on a wheat farm in Wisconsin in 1887, the second of seven children, Georgia O'Keeffe had her eyes wide open to the beauty of nature from the very beginning, and by her twenties had become a formidable artist, and a strikingly original and spirited young woman. Moving first to Chicago and then to New York to pursue her studies, her consciousness was enlarged by her discovery of the modernist movement, and by the work both produced and shown by the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. Making her way in the world – first as a commercial artist and then as an art teacher – O'Keeffe developed her own original style. When Alfred Stieglitz discovered her work he was the first to exhibit it. Twenty-three years her senior, Stieglitz later fell in love with the artist as well as the work. O'Keeffe moved to New York in 1918 and married Stieglitz in 1924. She found herself a muse as well as an artist, and entered a circle of America's most vibrant and boundary-pushing artists – and became herself one of the most important and successful of them all. But O'Keeffe fell in love again – this time with the bewitching landscapes of New Mexico,. She began spending half of each year there, and when Stieglitz died in 1949 she moved there for good, and lived there for the rest of her life, taking pleasure in the otherworldly beauty of the Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiú. Following O'Keeffe's early bud and sensational bloom, her loves, losses, agonies and ecstasies, and her painting against the dying of the light, Roxana Robinson's spellbinding and definitive biography has now been updated for the twenty-first century with a new foreword and access to never-before-seen letters. Written with the cooperation of the O'Keeffe family, and with access to sources closed to biographers during O'Keeffe's lifetime, It remains an unparalleled portrait of one of the most important female artists of all time.

Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life (new edition)

The first biography written with full cooperation of the O'Keeffe family examines the artist's long and distinguished career, her personal relationships, and her significance in terms of American art and the women's movement

Au coeur des monts Adirondack, au nord-est de l'Etat de New York, connus pour la richesse et la variété de leur faune, Paul et Isabel Simmons, mariés depuis quelques mois, viennent passer l'été. Ils s'installent en bordure d'un lac paisible qui donne sur le pavillon familial, Sweetwater. Là, tous deux tentent de se reconstruire. Isabel, meurtrie par la perte de son premier mari, ne se berce pas trop d'illusions et nourrit juste l'espoir de ne pas vieillir seule au côté de Paul qui, lui, se remet peu à peu d'un douloureux divorce. Le couple se ressource au contact de la nature et de la famille de Paul : de son père Douglas, homme affable, qui règne en patriarche, de sa mère Charlotte, impériale, désinvolte et de son frère Whitney, aimable et laconique, étrangement resté célibataire. Pourtant, ce fragile équilibre va progressivement se fissurer jusqu'à faire éclater au grand jour les failles de chacun. Le drame approche, inéluctable. Un beau roman réaliste et psychologique qui questionne les délicats mécanismes du bonheur familial.

THE LUMINOUS AND GRIPPING NEW NOVEL FROM "ONE OF OUR BEST WRITERS" (JONATHAN YARDLEY, THE WASHINGTON POST) When Julia Lambert, an art professor, settles into her idyllic Maine house for the summer, she plans to spend the time tending her fragile relationships with her father, a repressive neurosurgeon, and her gentle mother, who is descending into Alzheimer's. But a shattering revelation intrudes: Julia's son Jack has spiraled into heroin addiction. In an attempt to save him, Julia marshals help from her looseknit clan: elderly parents; remarried ex-husband; removed sister; and combative eldest son. Ultimately, heroin courses through the characters' lives with an impersonal and devastating energy, sweeping the family into a world in which deceit, crime, and fear are part of daily life. Roxana Robinson is the author of Sweetwater, which Booklist called a "hold-your-breath novel of loss and love." Billy Collins praised Robinson as "a master at moving from the art of description to the work of excavating the truths about ourselves." In Cost, Robinson tackles addiction and explores its effects on the bonds of family, dazzling us with her hallmark subtlety and precision in evoking the emotional interiors of her characters. The result is a work in which the reader's sense of discovery and compassion for every character remains unflagging to the end, even as the reader, like the characters, is caught up in Cost's breathtaking pace.

A New York Times Notable Book: Roxana Robinson’s definitive biography of Georgia O’Keeffe is a rich and revealing portrait of the iconic American artist. Artist Georgia O’Keeffe was born into a family of strong Midwestern farmwomen and taught self-reliance at an early age. Coming of age in the modern era, she went on to defy the social conventions of her time and lead a successful and emancipated life full of creativity, feminism, and austerity that has taken on mythic proportion. Roxana Robinson’s multilayered book explores O’Keeffe’s journey to personal and professional independence, the evolution of her art, and her most influential relationships. Written with the cooperation of O’Keeffe’s family, and using sources unavailable during her lifetime, this biography presents the artist’s own voice through her letters to family and friends. Robinson follows O’Keeffe from her childhood on a Wisconsin farm to the center of the New York art scene where she met her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz championed O’Keeffe, exhibiting her work at his gallery and drawing her into his inner circle of early modernists. But O’Keeffe, ever caught between the demands of love and art, left New York to find inspiration in the New Mexico desert where she created some of her most renowned work. This vividly rendered, beautifully written account succeeds in capturing the passions, controversies, and contradictions in the life of an extraordinary woman.

In this brilliant, luminous novel, one of our finest realist writers gives us a story of surpassing depth and emotional power. Acclaimed for her lucid and compassionate exploration of the American family, Roxana Robinson sets her new work on familiar terrain—New York City and the Adirondacks—but with Sweetwater she transcends the particulars of the domestic sphere with a broader, more encompassing vision. In this poignant account of a young widow and her second marriage, Robinson expands her scope to include the larger natural world as well as the smaller, more intimate one of the home. Isabel Green’s marriage to Paul Simmons, after the death of her first husband, marks her reconnection to life—a venture she’s determined will succeed. But this proves to be harder than she’d anticipated, and the challenges of starting afresh seem more complicated in adulthood. Staying at the Simmons lodge for their annual summer visit, Isabel finds herself entering into a set of familial complexities. She struggles to understand her new husband, his elderly, difficult parents and his brother, whose relationship with Paul seems oddly fraught. Furthermore, her second marriage begins to cast into sharp relief the troubling echoes of her first. Isabel’s professional life plays a part as well: a passionate environmental advocate, she is aware of the tensions within the mountain landscape itself during a summer of spectacular beauty and ominous drought. In her cool, elegant prose, Robinson gracefully delivers a plot that is complex, surprising and ultimately wrenching in its impact. As the strands of family are woven tightly and inevitably together, and as the past painfully informs the present, the vivid backdrop of the physical world provides its own eloquent dynamic. Sweetwater is a stunning achievement by a writer at the peak of her craft.

In Roxana Robinson’s lucid and elegant prose, her characters’ inner worlds open up to us, revealing private emotional cores that are familiar in their needs, their secrets, and their longings. These people tell us the truth–not only about themselves, their relationships, and their lives, but about ourselves as well. In “Family Christmas,” a young girl takes a holiday trip to her grandparents’, where the formal atmosphere is shattered by a mysterious and chaotic event that she knows she’s too young to understand but struggles to comprehend. In “Blind Man,” a college professor copes with the onslaught of grief after his daughter’s death. In “The Face Lift,” two college friends renew their bond across a great cultural divide. The sad and hilarious “Assistance” flawlessly details the tragicomic aspects of ageing–seen through the eyes of a daughter-turned-caretaker. The terrors of illness are explored in “The Treatment,” and in “Assez,” a trip to Provence reveals the true volatility of love–and reminds us that we often don’t realize that what we have is enough until it’s gone. A Perfect Stranger powerfully and affectingly examines the complex, intricate network of experiences that binds us to one another. These stories are tender, raw, lovely, and fine–and they reaffirm Roxana Robinson’s place at the forefront of modern literature.

And Other Stories

A Perfect Stranger

When Julia Lambert settles into her idyllic Maine house for the summer, she plans to spend the time tending her fragile relationship with her father, a retired but demanding neurosurgeon, and her gentle mother, who is descending, unnoticed, into Alzheimer's. But a shattering revelation intrudes: her youngest son Jack, far from being a charming maverick, has spiralled into heroin addiction. In attempt to save him, Julia calls on all the members of her loose-knit family: her elderly parents; remarried ex-husband; detached sister; and combative eldest son. As heroin sweeps through each of their lives, with its impersonal and devastating energy, it drags the family into a world in which deceit, crime and fear are part of daily life. In her cool, elegant prose, Robinson delivers a novel of loss and love that is complex, surprising and breathtaking in its pace.

Tells the story of two upper-class people struggling to form a new life

This is My Daughter

Conrad has just returned home to Westchester after four years in Iraq, and something is very wrong. As he attempts to reconnect with his girlfriend and find his footing in the civilian world, he has an impossible time adjusting. As weeks turn into months, his estrangement increases.

A Maine vacation forces a young woman to challenge her own understanding of the world in a sharply insightful first novel

Roxana Robinson

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