Books by Ellen Gilchrist
The Cabal and Other Stories
A new collection of short fiction by the critically acclaimed author of Victory Over Japan introduces five witty, fun, and passionate new stories, as well as the title novella about a Mississippi psychiatrist who goes mad and begins to reveal his patients' deepest secrets, mishaps, and misdeeds to anyone who will listen. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.
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Flights of Angels: Stories
Described by "Publishers Weekly" as "easily Gilchrist's best book in years, " this collection of stories gives readers a taste of her gifted sense of the language and the humor of human foibles.
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Nora Jane: A Life in Stories
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.
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Net of Jewels: A Novel
Rhoda finally has everything she has ever wanted, but when she begins to question the simplicity of her upper-class, mid-1950s existence, it throws her into a frenetic and rebellious course toward destruction. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.
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The Annunciation
Amanda is rich, bored and middle-aged, a would-be-writer who has left her husband and traded New Orleans for the hill country of Arkansas. There she is happily translating an obscure 18th-century French poetess whose illicit affair led to imprisonment and suicide.Amanda finds herself infatuated with a student. What starts as a fling becomes a grand and impossible passion. Then she discovers she is pregnant, as was the woman whose poems she re-creates, and we watch as the parallel stories of these two women unfold, each ending tragically."Gilchrist's manner is both stylish and idiomatic--a rare and potent combination." (Times Literary Supplement)
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Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle
In her fourth collection of short stories, the American Book Award-winning author integrates favorite old characters with some colorful newcomers in such works as "The Man Who Kicked Cancer's Ass"
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Drunk With Love: A Book of Stories
Presents thirteen short stories peopled by such characters as Rhoda, a precocious nine-year-old; Nora Jane, an expectant mother of twins; and Crystal, an outrageous Southern belle
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Ellen Gilchrist: Collected Stories
With the publication of 1983's The Annunciation, Ellen Gilchrist established herself as a teller of charming, bittersweet tales of the modern South. Since then, her works of fiction - sixteen in all - have built up a solid base of dedicated fans.
With her uncanny insights into human character and the bittersweet complications of love, Ellen Gilchrist occupies a unique place in American fiction.
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Victory over Japan : Stories
The "funny, wise, and wonderful" (USA Today) book of short stories that won the National Book Award and established Ellen Gilchrist as a leading writer of the American South.
In her second collection, Ellen Gilchrist creates an unforgettable group of Southern women, enchanted and enchanting, who cavort through life, in and out of bars, marriages, and divorces, through the world of art and culture, drug busts, lovers' arms, and even earthquakes, in an attempt to find, if not happiness, at least some satisfaction. Throughout these stories, one hears echoes of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, but Ms. Gilchrist has her own unique literary voice -- and it is outrageously funny, moving, tragic, and always appealing.
"Ellen Gilchrist is terrific." --Norman Mailer
"This book is a delight." --Cleveland Plain Dealer
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Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior
Set in ancient Greece, a novel that explores a feisty slave girl’s flight to liberation
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$15.95
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (Voices of the South)
IN THE LAND OF DREAMY DREAMS is Ellen Gilchrist's fabled first collection of stories, the book that won her acclaim in 1981 and to which each of her subsequent works has been compared. Peopled largely with young southern females who chafe against the restrictions of their upper-class lives, these stories convey the humor and tragedy to be found wherever retreat into imagination is preferred over reality. Introduced here are Nora Jane Whittington, Rhoda Manning, and other recurring Gilchrist characters beloved for their failures, tenacity, and all-too-human hope in the face of frustrated love.
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Things like the Truth: Out of My Later Years
Winner of the National Book Award and the author of numerous highly praised works of fiction and nonfiction, Ellen Gilchrist is also a daughter, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother who takes delight in her large, wonderful family. Things like the Truth offers a collection of nonfiction essays about Ellen Gilchrist's life, family, home, work, aging, and the fun of fighting to stay healthy in an increasingly undisciplined culture. This collection brings together for the first time essays by Ellen Gilchrist on her later life and family. Essays such as “The Joy of Swimming” reveal how Gilchrist, as an aging person, thinks about the joys one can discover late in life. Other essays focus on surgery, money, childhood memories, changing perspectives, and the vagaries of the age. Gilchrist pays special attention to her evolving relationships with her adult children and the pleasures and pitfalls of being a grandmother and great-grandmother. The volume also includes essays from her diary about the sense of place in her mountain home near her work at the University of Arkansas and about life after Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, her second residence.
Reviewers have praised Gilchrist's “deliciously wise and humorous voice” in her stories and that same voice pours forth in these essays. Gilchrist takes delight in the foibles of human behavior and searches for humor and wisdom in every situation. She also loves to give advice, and happily dispenses guidance to fans, family, and anyone in a grocery store line. This collection of essays presents Gilchrist at her best. Engaging, funny, and fearless, she describes the joys and difficulties of a well-lived life. Her fans will devour these essays and will revel again in the company of an author they know so well. Both personal and profound, with plenty of humor, this collection allows Gilchrist's inimitable spirit to shine throughout.
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$29.95
A Dangerous Age: A Novel
by Ellen Gilchrist, Kelly Killoren
The winner of the National Book Award returns with a moving story of a family of women drawn together by the trials of the times.
The women in the Hand family are no strangers to either controversy or sadness. Those traits seem, in fact, to be a part of their family’s heritage, one that stretches back through several generations and many wars. A Dangerous Age is a celebration of the strength of these women and of the bonds of blood and shared loss that hold them together. Louise, Winifred, and Olivia are reconnecting the pieces of their lives and rediscovering love, but each is unwittingly on a collision course with a seemingly distant war that is really never more than a breath away. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, this finely honed novel about the centuries-old struggle for women who are left to carry on with life when their men go off to war is by a writer the Washington Post says “should be declared a national cultural treasure.”
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$23.95
A Dangerous Age: A Novel
by Ellen Gilchrist, Kelly Killoren
Couture royalty meets downtown grit and heady artists mingle with freewheeling socialites in A Dangerous Age, a sophisticated, indulgent, and delicious novel of contemporary New York City, perfect for fans of The Real Housewives franchise and Sex and the City.
It’s the dog days of a sweltering Manhattan summer, and four sophisticated best friends who once took New York by storm are secretly falling apart at the seams. Lucy’s marriage to a renowned artist is slowly crumbling, with an explosive secret that threatens them both. Sarah, in the middle of auditioning for an auspicious new television show, realizes that her socialite standing is in jeopardy after countless disastrous events. Billy—a queen in the kitchen—has finally left her former life behind to become a highbrow cuisine artist. And Lotta, a knockout downtown art dealer, spends her free time guzzling cocktails in both the grittiest and most expensive clubs around town—but now, she’s taken it a little too far.
In this addicting and refreshing comedy of manners reminiscent of Edith Wharton, Lucy, Sarah, Billy, and Lotta go to all ends to hide their troubles in a city that worships only the young, twentysomething it-girl. But in the end, there’s no denying that these women have all entered a very dangerous age...and who knows how they’ll emerge on the other side in this dizzying novel of glitz, glamour, and soirees.
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The Writing Life
by Annie Dillard, Ellen Gilchrist
"For nonwriters, it is a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions of a life spent with words. For writers, it is a warm, rambling, conversation with a stimulating and extraordinarily talented colleague." — Chicago Tribune
From Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a collection that illuminates the dedication and daring that characterizes a writer's life.
In these short essays, Annie Dillard—the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood—illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions.
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The Writing Life
by Annie Dillard, Ellen Gilchrist
Celebrated author Ellen Gilchrist played many roles―writer and speaker, wife and lover, mother and grandmother. But she had never tackled the role of teacher.
Offered the opportunity to teach creative writing at the University of Arkansas, she accepted the challenge and ventured into unknown territory. In the process of teaching more than two hundred students since her first class in 2000, she found inspiration in their lives and ambitions and in the challenge of conveying to them the lessons she had learned from living and writing.
The Writing Life brings together fifty essays and vignettes centered on the transforming magic of literature and the teaching and writing of it. A portion of the collection discusses the delicate balance between an artistic life and family commitments, especially the daily pressures and frequent compromises faced by a young mother. Gilchrist next focuses on the process of writing itself with essays ranging from “How I Wrote a Book of Short Stories in Three Months” to “Why Is Rewriting So Hard?”
Several essays discuss her appreciation of other writers, from Shakespeare to Larry McMurtry, and the lessons she learned from them. Eudora Welty made an indelible impact on Gilchrist’s work. When Gilchrist takes on the task of teaching, her essays reveal an enriched understanding of the role writing plays in any life devoted to the craft. Humorous and insightful, she assesses her own abilities as an instructor and confronts the challenge of inspiring students to attain the discipline and courage to pursue the sullen art. Some of these pieces have been previously published in magazines, but most are unpublished, and all appear here in book form for the first time.
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The Writing Life
by Annie Dillard, Ellen Gilchrist
A best-selling, Pulizer Prize-winning author looks at her craft and, in a series of illuminating metaphors and anecdotes, paints a picture of a demanding, unpredictable, and sometimes absurd existence
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Falling Through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist (Banner Books)
Ellen Gilchrist has amassed a nationwide following, and her readers eagerly anticipate each new short story collection and novel. The sassy and moving commentaries she recorded for National Public Radio were a large part of the original kindling for this intense interest.
In Falling Through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist the spark that first attracted this audience flashes again in fifty-eight short essays drawn from those enormously successful broadcasts. To update and continue the dialogue she has always maintained with her fans, Gilchrist has added fifteen new essays.
Originally published in 1987 by Little, Brown and Company, Falling Through Space provides a funny and intimate diary of a writer's self-discovery. Author of more than a dozen books and winner of the National Book Award, Gilchrist is a beloved and distinctive southern voice whose life and memories are every bit as entertaining as the wild and poignant short stories for which she is famous.
The short essays that anchor this book vividly explore the Mississippi plantation life of her childhood; the books, teachers, and artists who influenced her development; and her thoughts about writing and life in general. Coupled with forty-two pictures from Gilchrist's youth and adulthood, these slices of life create a running autobiography.
In new essays, originally published in such magazines as Vogue, Outside, New Woman, and the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, Gilchrist reveals her origins, influences, and the way she works when she writes. Required reading for any fan, this book is Ellen Gilchrist at her funniest and best. For her readers it confirms her spontaneity and her talent for finding life at its zaniest and brightest.
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In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (Southern Revivals)
A new edition of the author's first published short story collection
In her 1981 collection of stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Ellen Gilchrist writes about New Orleans as no other writer. Laced with envy, greed, lust, terror, and self-deceit, her stories will shock and compel readers. Gilchrist's characters, women who dream of independent lives beyond the shadows of their husbands and fathers, resort to outrageous schemes in pursuit of freedom and fulfillment, despite the consequences. The range of emotions and realities encompassed by Gilchrist's work is suggested by the story titles: "Rich," "There's a Garden of Eden," "The Famous Poll at Jody's Bar," "In the Land of Dreamy Dreams," "Suicides," "1957, a Romance," "Generous Pieces," "Indignities," "Revenge," "Perils of the Nile," "Traveler," and "Summer, an Elegy."
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Acts of God
The human race. You have to love it and wish it well and not preach or think you have any reason to think you are better than anyone else. Amen. Good-bye. Peace . . .
Master short story writer Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the National Book Award, returns with her first story collection in over eight years. In Acts of God, she has crafted ten different scenarios in which people dealing with forces beyond their control somehow manage to survive, persevere, and triumph, even if it is only a triumph of the will.
For Marie James, a teenager from Fayetteville, Arkansas, the future changes when she joins a group of friends in their effort to find survivors among the debris left when a tornado destroys a neighboring town.
For Philipa, a woman blessed with beauty and love and a life without care, the decision she makes to take control of her fate is perhaps the easiest she has ever made. As she writes to Charles, her husband and lifetime partner, “Nothing is of value except to have lived well and to die without pain.”
For Eli Naylor, left orphaned by a flood, there comes an understanding that sometimes out of tragedy can come the greatest good, as he finds a life and a future in a most unexpected place.
In one way or another, all of these people are fighters and believers, survivors who find the strength to go on when faced with the truth of their mortality, and they are given vivid life in these stories, told with Ellen Gilchrist’s clear-eyed optimism and salty sense of humor.
As a critic in the Washington Post wrote in reviewing one of the author’s earlier works, “To say that Ellen Gilchrist can write is to say that Placido Domingo can sing. All you have to do is listen."
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Acts of God
From a National Book Award–winning “master of short fiction,” a collection of “sharp, funny and insightful” stories (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
Three middle-aged women set off on a vacation in Italy, but are sidelined along the way by terrorist activity. In post-Katrina New Orleans, an elderly couple makes a last effort at independence from caretakers and infirmities. These short stories and others, from the acclaimed author of Victory Over Japan and A Dangerous Age, feature characters dealing with forces beyond their control, yet somehow managing to triumph—even if only in spirit.
“Reading Ellen Gilchrist is addictive . . . Her new work is filled with good people who show fortitude and even heroism under duress . . . In this age of edgy irony, her warm-hearted view of humanity is refreshing.” —NPR
“The stories in Acts of God are great postcards from the world of Ellen Gilchrist. It’s a world of war and strife and surprises, and it is, yes, marvelous to behold.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Gilchrist is at her best when the wry and satirical mood strikes her . . . and it’s a pleasure to report that the best of the stories in Acts of God rank with the best in her first collection and in her second . . . for which she was awarded a richly deserved National Book Award.” —The Washington Post
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$15.95
Dangerous Age: A Novel
The winner of the National Book Award returns with a moving story of a family of women drawn together by the trials of the times.
The women in the Hand family are no strangers to either controversy or sadness. Those traits seem, in fact, to be a part of their family’s heritage, one that stretches back through several generations and many wars. A Dangerous Age is a celebration of the strength of these women and of the bonds of blood and shared loss that hold them together. Louise, Winifred, and Olivia are reconnecting the pieces of their lives and rediscovering love, but each is unwittingly on a collision course with a seemingly distant war that is really never more than a breath away. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, this finely honed novel about the centuries-old struggle for women who are left to carry on with life when their men go off to war is by a writer the Washington Post says “should be declared a national cultural treasure.”
Copies
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$14.95