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"Tyler, Anne author"
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The beginner's goodbye
\"Anne Tyler gives us a wise, haunting, and deeply moving novel in which she explores how a middle-aged man, ripped apart by the death of his wife, is gradually restored by her frequent appearances--in their house, on the roadway, in the market. Crippled in his right arm and leg, Aaron has spent his childhood fending off a sister who wants to manage him. So when he meets Dorothy, a plain, outspoken, independent young woman, she is like a breath of fresh air. Unhesitatingly, he marries her, and they have a relatively happy, unremarkable marriage. But when a tree crashes into their house and Dorothy is killed, Aaron feels as though he has been erased forever. Only Dorothy's unexpected appearances from the dead help him to live in the moment and to find some peace. Gradually he discovers, as he works in the family's vanity-publishing business, turning out titles that presume to guide beginners through the trials of life, that maybe for this beginner there is a way of saying goodbye. A beautiful, subtle exploration of loss and recovery, pierced throughout with Anne Tyler's humor, wisdom, and always penetrating look at human foibles\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Female Impersonation
A feminist and psychoanalytic investigation of the contemporary fascination with impersonation. The questions raised by female impersonations in a wide range of contemporary media are considered.
Carole-Anne Tyler is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California at Riverside.
eBook
Clock dance
Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother, yet the prospect is dimming. So, when Willa receives a phone call from a stranger, telling her that her son's ex-girlfriend has been shot, she drops everything and flies across the country to Baltimore. The impulsive decision to look after this woman and her nine-year-old daughter will lead Willa into uncharted territory-- surrounded by eccentric neighbors, plunged into the rituals that make a community a family, and forced to find solace in unexpected places.
Book
BRIGHT SCRAPS OF FICTION FROM MARY GORDON
In all three of her novels (\"Final Payments,\" \"The Company of Women,\" and \"Men and Angels\"), Mary Gordon has shown a considerable sense of control and direction. She gives readers the impression even on the very first page that she has a specific goal in mind for her plot; and so we relax, confident in her powers. This quality in her novels bears mentioning because it is so conspicuously lacking in her short stories. The 18 pieces in \"Temporary Shelter\" range from plotless fragments to longer, more conventionally organized tales. Nearly all, though, have the feeling of bright scraps of fabric saved in a trunk. They're not big enough to be used for anything important, but they're too pretty to discard.
Newspaper Article
French braid
The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever venture beyond Baltimore, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understands. Yet as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influence on one another ripples unmistakably through each generation, much like French-braided hair keeps its waves even after it is undone.
HOW TO HANG LOOSE, GROW UP RESILIENT IN THE ERSATZ FAMILY
It's a wonderful title, isn't it? And a wonderful book, as it turns out. Elizabeth Benedict's second novel covers some 10 years in the life of Esme Singer, daughter of an alcoholic, Lauren Bacall look-alike mother and a ne'er-do-well father whose get-rich-quick schemes take him to Hong Kong, Houston, Las Vegas-anywhere but home with the child who needs him. When we first see Esme she is 8-years-old, fat and plain, living in New York with her mother and her new stepfather, Quinn Laughlin. \"Why do you always call him Quinn Laughlin?\" she asks her mother at one point.
Newspaper Article
Digging to America : a novel
Two families awaiting the arrival of their adopted infant daughters from Korea meet at the airport. The families lives become interwined after the Donaldsons, a young American couple invite the Yazdan's, Maryam, her son and his Iranian American wife to an arrival party, which becomes an annual event. Maryam, who came to this country thirty-five years earlier, feels her values threatened when she is courted by a newly widowed Donaldson. A penetrating light on the American way as seen from two perspectives, those who are born here and those who are still struggling to fit in.
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A loving carelessness Sue Miller's novel captures the sass and grit of family life
Fittingly enough, family pictures are mentioned often in \"Family Pictures.\" Nina Eberhardt, fourth-born in the large, chaotic Hyde Park household upon which this novel centers, acquires a camera while still a child and thereafter aims it regularly at her relatives, taking photos whose composition points up the family's ever-changing alliances and divisions. Sometimes their father seems the outsider-David Eberhardt, psychiatrist, observing his wife and six children from just a shade too great a remove. Sometimes the division lies between the \"giants\" and the \"extras\"-the parents and their first three children being the giants, the last three little girls the extras, unwanted by their father but wanted desperately by their mother after her discovery that the second son, Randall, is autistic. And when Randall is sent away in adolescence, the division shifts to exclude the two rebels, Nina and her brother Mack, who all at once become problems themselves as if to fill the vaccum. Then there are the photos that at first glance seem to have nothing to do with the family: the artful experiments Nina undertakes later as a professional photographer: urban playground scenes where a deliberately blurry background swirls around the subject. Her father, studying these, is disturbed all at once by a memory of 2-year-old Randall sitting impassive in a noisy Independence Day parade: \"`What on earth is wrong with that child?' a spectator asked. It was David's first intimation that all was not right with his eerily beautiful son.\"
Newspaper Article
Painting with words Childhood losses frame a deftly evocative portrait of the '60s
It should be no surprise, therefore, that when Johnson actually does write a novel, it's almost heartbreakingly evocative. \"In the Night Cafe\" summons up the New York of the early '60s. The Beat Generation has faded away, but her hero, Tom Murphy, would have felt at home among Kerouac and company. He's a tough, hard-drinking ex-Navy man who's ditched his wife and children to come to New York and paint abstract expressionist paintings; and when our young narrator, Joanna, meets him it is love at very nearly first sight. Joanna's a bit more sedate than Tom-she works as an office temporary while rather desultorily pursuing an acting career-but she's cool enough, non-judgmental enough, so that they get along well together. In no time, they marry. But Tom is troubled by thoughts of the young son he abandoned, and he becomes increasingly self-destructive. Little more than a year after the wedding, he's killed. (Readers have been told as much at the outset, so I'm not giving anything away.) Joanna eventually remarries and has a son, but she never gets over her attachment to Tom Murphy. What gives this story its framework is the theme of the abandoned child. The book opens with a description of Tom Murphy's lifelong search for the father who left him in his infancy. Then we're shown Tom's small son-the child he himself left-meeting Joanna in New York a year after Tom's death and listening with pathetic concentration for any clue to his father. Only at this point does Joanna start telling us her own story in chronological order: her first encounter with Tom, their courtship and marriage, and Tom's death.
Newspaper Article
2 BOOKS IN 1 PUTS STRAIN ON READER
At the heart of \"Jack Rivers and Me,\" which won a major award for first fiction in the author's native Australia, are two small boys--one of them real and the other an imaginary playmate. But don't let that mislead you; this is no \"Winnie the Pooh.\" A publisher's note compares the book to Dylan Thomas' \"Under Milk Wood,\" and with good reason. The novel's real central character is an entire town. Boomeroo is the town's name--a combination of \"boomerang\" and \"kangaroo\"--and its citizens are \"Boomeroosters.\" When Boomeroosters have something to think over, they go meditate in the Death Seat, a carved-out tree trunk in the middle of an intersection. There a drinking man can practice his alibis (\"It's like this, luv. Me cobber got made a foreman and . . . \") and a child can rage against a bully (\"I hate Swiftie Madison! I'll hate him till the day I die . . . \") and a young girl can pray for a husband (\"But please, God . . . don't let him be a miner.\").
Newspaper Article