Ballantine reader's circle

"Anne Tyler draws our eyes to an ill-matched couple, and the slow, tragicomic disintegration of their marriage."--

Edgerton chronicles 20 years in the lives of the Copelands of North Carolina, a family just on the fringes of white trash. Albert buys kits to build floatplanes which never work, and his floatplane logbook becomes a family album of sorts.

"Iris Greenfeder, ABD (All But Dissertation), has just turned forty, lives in Manhattan, and works three teaching jobs to support herself. Recently she's felt that the "buts" are taking over her life: all but published, all but a professor, all but married (to Jack, her boyfriend of ten years). Yet the sudden impulse to write a story about her mother leads to a shot at literary success. The piece recounts an eerie Irish fairy tale her mother used to tell her at bedtime - and nestled inside it is the sad story of her mother's death...". "More than fifty years ago, Iris's mother, Katherine Morrissey, arrived at the Catskills's grand Hotel Equinox penniless, with almost no belongings. Kay was hired as a maid but refused to speak of her past or her family. One year later, she married Ben Greenfeder, the hotel's manager. During the hotel's off-season, Kay wrote the first two fantasy novels of a planned trilogy. There never was a third book. When Iris was nine, her mother left one day for a writer's conference - and never came back. Kay died that very night in a hotel fire on Coney Island, registered as another man's wife." "Now Hedda Wolfe, Kay's former literary agent, has a proposal: If Iris will return to the Hotel Equinox where she grew up, research her mother's life, and find the third and final manuscript that Hedda is convinced exists, then she can guarantee Iris a huge advance to write her mother's biography.". "Transfixed by the notion of a third book, Iris believes that it will hold clues to the mysteries of Kay's life - and death. But as she begins to peer into the thicket of her mother's hidden world, stinging revelations leave Iris with new questions. When a deadly "accident" befalls the one man who could shed some light on Kay, it becomes clear that Iris is not alone in her deep interest in her mother's past - or in her search for a lost manuscript that might hold more secrets than she ever expected."--BOOK JACKET.

In "Live Bottomless," thirteen-year-old Jenny tells the painful and hilarious tale of her philandering father's fall from grace and the family's subsequent trip to Keys West as her parents attempt a "geographical cure" for their troubled marriage. In "The Southern Cross," Chanel, a girl of easy virtue and dubious reputation, chronicles her cruise around the Caribbean with three Atlanta developers. "I may be old, but I'm not dead," begins Alice Scully, scandalizing her retirement-home writers' group in "The Happy Memories Club." And prim, old-maid Sarah is titillated by the housekeeper's horrific account of her daughter's "blue wedding.". In "The Bubba Stories," Charlene Christian explains, "I made Bubba up in the spring of 1963 in order to increase my popularity with my girlfriends"; but this legendary brother takes on a life of his own. Paula's damaged brother Johnny, in the title story, is "writing a new kind of book," constructing another narrative of his tragic life. Brothers, sisters, and friends appear in these stories as the narrators' other selves, offering other possibilities. Here we have news of the spirit, indeed: stories about longing and despair and imagination and grace, about love in all its strange and shifting forms.

"Revered for her powerful female characters, Lee Smith tells a perceptive story of how college pals who grew up in an era when they were still called "girls" have negotiated life as women. Harriet Holding is a hesitant teacher who has never married (she can't explain why, even to herself). Courtney Gray struggles to escape her Southern Living lifestyle. Catherine Wilson, a sculptor, is suffocating in her happy third marriage. Anna Todd is a world-famous romance novelist escaping her own tragedies through her fiction. And finally there is Baby, the girl they come to bury - along with their memories of her rebellions and betrayals."--BOOK JACKET.

The orchid thief in Susan Orlean's true story of beauty and obsession is John Laroche, a renegade plant dealer and sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing his front teeth and has the posture of al dente spaghetti. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole Indians were arrested with rare orchids they had stolen from a wild swamp in south Florida that is filled with some of the world's most extraordinary plants and trees. Laroche had planned to clone the orchids and then sell them for a small fortune to impassioned collectors. After he was caught in the act, Laroche set off one of the oddest legal controversies in recent memory, which brought together environmentalists, Native American activists, and devoted orchid collectors. The result is a tale that is strange, compelling, and hilarious.

She has as much business keeping a stray dog as she would walking across Egyptwhich not so incidentally is the title of her favorite hymn. She's Mattie Rigsbee, an independent, strong-minded senior citizen who, at seventy-eight, might be slowing down just a bit. When teenage delinquent Wesley Benfield drops in on her life, he is even less likely a companion than the stray dog. But, of course, the dog never tasted her mouth-watering pound cake. Wise and witty, down-home and real, Walking Across Egypt is a book for everyone.

Every evening at five o'clock, Christina and Rudy stopped work and began the ritual commonly known as Happy Hour. Rudy mixed Christina's drink with loving precision, the cavalier slosh of Bombay Sapphire over ice shards, before settling across from her in his Stickley chair with his glass of Scotch. They shared a love of language and music (she is an author, he a composer, after all), a delight in intense conversation, a fascination with popes, and nearly thirty years of life together.What did I think, that we had forever? muses Christina, seven months after Rudy's unexpected death. While coming to terms with her loss, with the space that Rudy once inhabited, Christina reflects on their vibrant bond--with all its quirks, habits, and unguarded moments--as well as her passionate sorrow and her attempts to reposition herself and her new place in the very real world they shared.In this literary jewel, a bittersweet novella of absence and presence and the mysterious gap between them, Gail Godwin has performed a small miracle. In essence, Evenings at Five is a grief sonata for solo instrument transposed into words. Interwoven with meditations and movements, full of aching truths and a wicked sense of humor, it exquisitely captures the cyclical nature of commitment--and the eternal quality of a romance completed.

The Sparrow is a novel about a remarkable man, a living saint, a life-long celibate and Jesuit priest, who undergoes an experience so harrowing and profound that it makes him question the existence of God. This experience--the first contact between human beings and intelligent extraterrestrial life--begins with a small mistake and ends in a horrible catastrophe.

Small town photographer sacrifices his chances for a wife and family in order to make a home for his hypochondriac brother.

Novel

Drawing on the experience of celebrated women, from George Sand and Virginia Woolf to Dorothy Sayers and Adrienne Rich, Heilbrun examines the struggle these writers undertook when their drives made it impossible for them to follow the traditional "male" script for a woman's life. Refreshing and insightful, this is an homage to brave women past and present, and an invitation to all women to write their own scripts, whatever they may be.

A saga of a Chinese-Cuban family begins in 1857, when Chen Pan signs a contract that takes him from China to Cuba and enslavement on a sugarcane plantation and follows him as he finds prosperity in Havana's Chinatown.

"The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart begins with a lyrical, autobiographical story of a marriage set in the violent and volatile Deep South during the early years of the civil rights movement. Walker goes on to imagine stories that grew out of the life following that marriage - a life, she writes, that was "marked by deep sea-changes and transitions." These provocative stories showcase Walker's hard-won knowledge of love of many kinds and of the relationships that shape our lives, as well as her infectious sense of humor and joy."--BOOK JACKET.