A Dangerous Age: A Novel

Description

Ellen Gilchrist is one of America's most celebrated and respected authors, a classic writer in the tradition of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Elizabeth Spencer. The author of more than twenty books, she was awarded the National Book Award for her short story collection Victory Over Japan. Now, with her first novel in more than a decade, she returns in top form.

A Dangerous Age tells the story of the women of the Hand family, three cousins in a Southern dynasty rich with history and tradition who are no strangers to either controversy or sadness. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, the novel is a celebration of the strength of these women, and of others like them. In her characteristically clear and direct prose, with its wry, no-nonsense approach to the world and the people who inhabit it, Gilchrist gives voice to women on a collision course with a distant war that, in truth, is never more than a breath away.

As the Washington Post has said, "To say that Ellen Gilchrist can write is to say that Placido Domingo can sing. All you need to do is listen."

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The Writing Life

Description

Celebrated author Ellen Gilchrist has played many roles-writer and speaker, wife and lover, mother and grandmother. But she never tackled the role of teacher.

Offered the opportunity to teach creative writing at the University of Arkansas, she took up the challenge and ventured into unknown territory. In the process of teaching more than two hundred students since her first class in 2000, she has found inspiration in their lives and ambitions and in the challenge of conveying to them the lessons she has learned from living and writing.

The Writing Life brings together fifty essays and vignettes centered on the transforming magic of literature and the teaching and writing of it. A portion of the collection discusses the delicate balance between an artistic life and family commitments, especially the daily pressures and frequent compromises faced by a young mother. Gilchrist next focuses on the process of writing itself with essays ranging from "How I Wrote a Book of Short Stories in Three Months" to "Why Is Rewriting so Hard?"

Several essays discuss her appreciation of other writers, from Shakespeare to Larry McMurtry, and the lessons she learned from them. Eudora Welty made an indelible impact on Gilchrist's work. When Gilchrist takes on the task of teaching, her essays reveal an enriched understanding of the role writing plays in any life devoted to the craft. Humorous and insightful, she assesses her own abilities as an instructor and confronts the challenge of inspiring students to attain the discipline and courage to pursue the sullen art. Some of these pieces have been previously published in magazines, but most are unpublished and all appear here in book form for the first time.

Ellen Gilchrist, Fayetteville, Arkansas, is the author of many novels and collections of essays, short stories, and novellas, including The Cabal and Other Stories, Flights of Angels, The Age of Miracles, The Courts of Love, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Victory Over Japan (winner of the National Book Award), Drunk with Love, Ellen Gilchrist: Collected Stories, and I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy.

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Ellen Gilchrist: Collected Stories

Description

With the publication of 1983's The Annunciation, Ellen Gilchrist established herself as a teller of charming, bittersweet tales of the modern South.

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The Age of Miracles

Description

In her exuberantly funny, bittersweet new collection, 'The Age of Miracles, ' ordinary events start the wheel of fate spinning in unexpected directions: a deluge of dust motes leads a socialite to seek a healthier climate, where she finds romance instead of rest.

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Drunk With Love

Description

This latest collection of thirteen masterful short stories by the author of Victory Over Japan brings more critical acclaim to the writer who has been called "a natural teller of tales."

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Starcarbon: A Meditation on Love: A Novel

Description

The story of three couples searching for love and inner peace--as tornadoes devastate middle America and the Soviet Union falls apart on television--features the Hand clan and explores the varied aspects of modern love. Reprint. 25,000 first printing. NYT.

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