Arbor House library of contemporary Americana

"Until the day of Merriwether's departure from the house--a month after his divorce--the Merriwether family looked like an ideally tranquil one" we read on the first page of Other Men's Daughters. It is the late 1960s, and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are full of long-haired hippies decked out in colorful garb, but Dr. Robert Merriwether, who teaches at Harvard and has been married for a good long time, hardly takes note. Learned, curious, thoughtful, and a creature of habit, Merriwether is anything but an impulsive man, and yet over the summer, while Sarah, his wife, is away on vacation, he meets a summer student, Cynthia Ryder, and before long the two have fallen into bed and in love. Richard Stern's novel is an elegant and unnerving examination of just how cold and destructive a thing love, "the origin of so much story and disorder," can be.

Garnet Montrose returns home from Vietnam to small-town Virginia with injuries so terrible that people become ill at the sight of him. Seeking assistance and companionship in his isolation, Garnet hires two young male caretakers, Quintus and Daventry. His interest and curiosity are awakened by the books Quintus reads to him, but in the handsome Daventry he finds a powerful, transformative love unlike anything he has experienced before. In this story of the strange, moving relationship of these three men, by turns Gothic, mystical and grotesque, James Purdy has crafted one of his most memorable novels.

Elizabeth is a demure twenty-three-year-old whiling her life away at a dull museum job, living with her neurotic aunt, and subsisting off her dead mother's inheritance. When Elizabeth begins to suffer terrible migraines and backaches, her aunt takes her to the doctor, then to a psychiatrist. But slowly, and with Jackson's characteristic chill, we learn that Elizabeth is not just one girl--but four separate, self-destructive personalities.

In antiquity and among primitive peoples the storyteller enjoyed a unique role and had to live up to a heavy responsibility. He had to celebrate heroes (try Schaefer's story Jeremy Rodock), teach essential lessons (try Hugo Kertchak, Builder) provide emotional/sentimental release (try Stubby Pringle's Christmas), add to the historical record (try--all of them). Schaefer checks out on every angle. Nobody writes about the West like Schaefer who, almost singlehandedly, rescued the image of cowboys from the paper-thin paperbacks and the Hollywood hokum. The top brand on a prime herd.