John Treadwell Nichols

The second and center piece in a trilogy of memoirs that John Nichols wrote about his first fifteen years in Taos, New Mexico.

A funny and pathetic account of the beginning and end of an offbeat love affair between two crazy but appealing college kids.

FRAGILE DREAMS Maurizio Varelli shattered her dreams of love. With businesslike efficiency, the family patriarch informed Vicki the marriage she had come to Italy for would never take place -- and that she must marry him instead. Maurizio's swarthy face and powerful body were intimidating. Yet when he spoke again, it was as though he understood the deepest recesses of Vicki's heart -- and she was held captive by this touch of gentleness. Maurizio presented his case, lost in the medieval beauty of her dark eyes. He had to convince her -- for he knew that the moment he touched her he could never let her go.

Roger and Zelda were lovers. Best friends. Ardent, fun-loving, passionate, they were intellectual and sexual soul mates, a perfect match. And then they got married. How is it that a little piece of paper and a signature in the courthouse records can make such a difference? What happens when love becomes legal is the wellspring of this bawdy, exuberant, all too recognizably familiar tale of modern marriage. As Roger tells it - and does he ever tell it! - Zelda emerges as both ravening monster and glamorous wild woman: jealous, possessive, competitive, greedy . . . yet also fantastical, erotic, and wickedly imaginative. But who is the real Zelda? Little by little, doubts about Roger's version creep in until what began as a comedy of manners (admittedly bad) turns into a wry and telling commentary on true love and the egocentricity of the eternal male. And so the war goes on. Conjugal Bliss is John Nichols' ninth novel. A sexual comedy that will draw blood as well as laughs, it is Nichols at his funniest, most outrageous best.

During the forty years in which a rural southwestern backwater is transformed into a boomtown and industrial mecca, the townspeople try to adjust to their loss of land and heritage.

"Conventional understandings of the family in nineteenth-century literary studies depict a venerated institution rooted in sentiment, sympathy, and intimacy. American Blood upends this notion, showing how novels of the period frequently emphasize the darker sides of the vaunted domestic unit. Rather than a source of security and warmth, the family emerges as exclusionary, deleterious to civic life, and antagonistic to the political enterprise of the United States. Through inventive readings supported by cultural-historical research, Holly Jackson explores critical depictions of the family in a range of both canonical and forgotten novels." -- dust jacket

"Charley McFarland is an aging '60s radical and a continuing advocate of losing political battles. When a proposed local highway bypass threatens the home of the exquisitely obscure Rocky Mountain Phistic Copper butterfly, he knows it's time to rally the troops once more.". "His dysfunctional Butterfly Coalition includes his estranged, brilliant but self-destructive wife, Kelly; his baffling, Gen-X son, Luther; the sharp-tongued, chain-smoking Lydia Babcock, who owns the butterfly's turf; Susan Delgado, a hyperactive local reporter smitten with Charley; and other idealistic misfits he lures into the fight against the powers-that-be.". "Kelly and Charley, still in love and at each other's throats, relish the butterfly's cause as their last, best chance at reconciliation. But as the crusade's momentum builds, the chaotic relationships driving it also threatens to tear it - and the town - apart."--BOOK JACKET.