Penelope Mortimer

The Pumpkin Eater is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist’s couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice immediately captures and holds our attention. She is the mother of a vast, swelling brood of children, also nameless, and the wife of a successful screenwriter, Jake Armitage. The Armitages live in the city, but they are building a great glass tower in the country in which to settle down and live happily ever after. But could that dream be nothing more than a sentimental delusion? At the edges of vision the spectral children come and go, while our heroine, alert to the countless gradations of depression and the innumerable forms of betrayal, tries to make sense of it all: doctors, husbands, movie stars, bodies, grocery lists, nursery rhymes, messes, aging parents, memories, dreams, and breakdowns. How to pull it all together? Perhaps you start by falling apart.

From The Paris Review: "Family life is Mortimer’s subject, and in Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, she picks it apart with precise, swift, sharp strokes. A mother finds herself locked out of the house she’s rented for her and her family’s holiday; tensions run high between members of a blended family on a Saturday spent at home; a dinner party careens out of the mousy hostess’s control; a husband and wife quarrel while out with their children on a blustery day; a woman in a nursing home is the only witness to the dark drama unfolding in the bed next to her; another is bossed around by her children and husband, all in the name of “rest” on her thirty-ninth birthday; a little girl runs away from boarding school in the middle of the night and home to her beloved father, only to have her faith in him destroyed when he immediately takes her back. “No one knows better how to catalogue in easy narrative the minutiae of domestic life,” wrote a critic in the Sunday Times, “or how to undermine domestic life’s apparent security.” Mortimer has a keen eye for the horror underneath the banality of the everyday, in particular that moment when someone familiar and benign turns monstrous." Lucy Scholes

Includes stories by Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Pritchett, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Tennessee Williams, Mary McCarthy, Roald Dahl, Dorothy Parker, Nadine Gordimer, Eudora Welty, and John Cheever, among others.

John Charrington's wedding / E. Nesbit -- Skeleton / Ray Bradbury -- Bronze / W.M. Tidmarsh -- As is / Robert Silverberg -- Smell / Joan Aiken -- The hungry house / Robert Bloch -- Did you see the window-cleaner? / John Edgell -- The skylight / Penelope Mortimer.