Ellen Gilchrist

The Court of Love opens with a series of stories about Nora Jane Whittington, who, once upon a time long ago, was a runaway teenage hipple. In a famous Gilchrist story she dressed as a nun and robbed a bar in New Orleans. Now, happily married and the mother of twins, Nora Jane returns to college and finds herself faced with a series of disasters that threaten her blissful life: a chance encounter between her husband and an old boyfriend, who fathered one of the twins; the assassination of a visiting writer; and a camping trip that nearly proves fatal. The resolution of these complications, aided by a mysterious visit from Leonardo da Vinci, culminates in the adaptation of two waifs, the marriage of an old friend, and the introduction of two new families into Gilchrist's galaxy of characters. The nine stories that follow, collectivity entitled "Past," explore the hazards of recapturing and reviving old affairs. Using new and familiar characters, these stories shed new light on the oldest and most powerful emotion.

Since receiving the National Book Award for "Victory Over Japan in 1985, Ellen Gilchrist has developed a fervently devoted readership. This collection's new novella is vintage Gilchrist, taking on the continuing joys and perils of Nora Jane and company.

"Ellen Gilchrist's debut novel expands the thematic and visual landscapes the author made indelibly hers in radiantly spun stories. The Annunciation follows the desires of Amanda McCamey: an unwed mother on a Mississippi Delta plantation at age fourteen, a wealthy New Orleans matron until her early forties, and now a divorced poetry student living in a university community in the Ozarks. When Amanda finds herself infatuated with an intense young musician, what at first appears to be a sexual intrigue becomes a grand and impossible passion that unfolds with striking parallels to the life of the eighteenth-century French poetess whose work she is translating."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of some of Ellen Gilchrist's best short stories.

The women in the Hand family are no strangers to controversy or sadness; after the losses of 9/11 and the sacrifices made in the war that followed, Louise, Winifred, and Olivia Hand are reconnecting the pieces of their lives and rediscovering love.