Books by Mary Gordon
Pearl: A Novel
On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics–nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself?
Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend (and Pearl’s surrogate father), Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearl’s side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, shetakes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Ireland’s tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Pearl: A Novel
LONG-LISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • Heartbreaking and redeeming, Pearl is the story of a young woman in a small English village who is struggling with the disappearance of her mother, what feels like a lifetime ago.
"A masterful novel, shot through with legend and song. It can be read on many levels: as a mystery, as a story of grief and healing, as a response to a poem. But most of all, it can be read as a story of love." —The Boston Globe
"A gorgeous, swirling, haunted and haunting potion of a book...How utterly moving, to be under its beautiful, artful spell." —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers and This Other Eden
Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing.
Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood.
As time passes, Marianne finds it difficult to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Yet, in one of her mother’s dusty old books, she discovers a medieval poem called Pearl, and, trusting in the promise of its consolation, it seems as if her life begins to parallel the poem's course.
But questions remain. Marianne is ever more tormented by the unmarked gravestone in the abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, and as her childhood home begins to crumble, the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. Can Marianne ever come to understand her mother’s choices? And will her own future as a mother help her find her peace?
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$17.00
Pearl
by Josh Malerman, Mary Gordon, Dr. Joseph H. Pollock, Molly Idle
Product Description
Death of Pearl started a reign of terror. Five Saturday morning poker players created a horrible rape death of an innocent 14 year old. A vicarious thrill that turned into murder. The prosecutor vying for governorship, iindicted an innocent man who was subsequently lynched.
About the Author
Dr. Pollock, a Beverly Hills surgeon lives in Santa Barbara, Ca. He has published five books. Interested in film and building the Pollock Theater at University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). Emeritus at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California.
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No copies available.
Pearl
by Josh Malerman, Mary Gordon, Dr. Joseph H. Pollock, Molly Idle
On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics–nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself? Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend (and Pearl’s surrogate father), Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearl’s side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, shetakes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Ireland’s tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.
Copies
No copies available.
Pearl
by Josh Malerman, Mary Gordon, Dr. Joseph H. Pollock, Molly Idle
Caldecott Honor author-illustrator Molly Idle dazzles with an original mermaid tale about how small, persistent actions can achieve great things.
Sometimes the tiniest light can shine the brightest! Like the other mermaids of the deep, Pearl longs to care for the endless beaches, coral reefs, and towering kelp forests of her vast ocean world. So when her mother asks her to tend to a mere grain of sand, Pearl is heartbroken. It takes all her patience and determination to discover how even the littlest mermaid can transform the world.
Caldecott Honor-winning author and artist Molly Idle has masterfully crafted a modern classic in this mesmerizing tale about the immense power of small actions.
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Pearl
by Josh Malerman, Mary Gordon, Dr. Joseph H. Pollock, Molly Idle
From Josh Malerman, the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Malorie, comes the legend of Pearl, a strange new monster unlike any other in horror (previously published as On This, the Day of the Pig).
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL • “Daring readers should find this tale of a malevolent telepathic pig to be a memorable experience.”—Booklist (starred review)
There’s something strange about Walter Kopple’s farm. At first it seems to be his grandson, who cruelly murders one of Walter’s pigs in an act of seemingly senseless violence. But then people in town begin to whisper that Walter’s grandson heard a voice commanding him to kill.
And that the voice belongs to a most peculiar creature: the pig named Pearl.
Walter is not sure what to believe. He knows he’s always been afraid of the strangely malevolent Pearl. But as madness and paranoia grip the town and the townspeople descend on Walter’s farm with violent wrath, they begin to discover that true evil wears a human face.
Copies
No copies available.
Pearl
by Josh Malerman, Mary Gordon, Dr. Joseph H. Pollock, Molly Idle
From Josh Malerman, the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Malorie, comes the legend of Pearl, a strange new monster unlike any other in horror (previously published as On This, the Day of the Pig).
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL • “Daring readers should find this tale of a malevolent telepathic pig to be a memorable experience.”—Booklist (starred review)
There’s something strange about Walter Kopple’s farm. At first it seems to be his grandson, who cruelly murders one of Walter’s pigs in an act of seemingly senseless violence. But then people in town begin to whisper that Walter’s grandson heard a voice commanding him to kill.
And that the voice belongs to a most peculiar creature: the pig named Pearl.
Walter is not sure what to believe. He knows he’s always been afraid of the strangely malevolent Pearl. But as madness and paranoia grip the town and the townspeople descend on Walter’s farm with violent wrath, they begin to discover that true evil wears a human face.
Copies
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Joan of Arc: A Life (Penguin Lives)
by Mary Gordon
"A master of the story form" (The New York Times) offers a fresh, revealing portrait of the legendary saint
Celebrated novelist Mary Gordon brings Joan of Arc alive as a complex figure full of contradictions and desires, as well as spiritual devotion. A humble peasant girl, Joan transformed herself into the legendary Maid of Orléans, knight, martyr, and saint. Following the voice of God, she led an army to victory and crowned the king of France, only to be captured and burned at the stake as a heretic—all by the age of nineteen. Gordon does more than tell this gripping story—she explores Joan's mystery and the many facets of her inspiring life.
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Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels
by Mary Gordon
Reading Jesus is a personal journey through the fundamental Biblical stories. As celebrated author Mary Gordon ponders the intense strangeness of a deity in human form, unresolved moral ambiguities within the text, and the problem posed to her as an enlightened reader by the miracle of the Resurrection. What she rediscovers—and reinterprets with her signature candor, intelligence, and straightforwardness—is a rich store of overlapping, sometimes conflicting teachings that feel both familiar and tantalizingly elusive.
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Final Payments
by Mary Gordon
When Isabel Moore's father dies, she finds herself, at the age of thirty, suddenly freed from eleven years of uninterrupted care for a helpless man. With all the patterns of her life suddenly rendered meaningless, she turns to childhood friends for support, gets a job, and becomes involved with two very different men. But just as her future begins to emerge, her past throws up a daunting challenge.
A moving story of self-reinvention, Final Payments is a timeless exploration of the nature of friendship, desire, guilt, and love.
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The Liar's Wife: Four Novellas
by Mary Gordon
The award-winning author at her storytelling best: four compelling novellas of Americans in Europe and Europeans in America.
In these absorbing and exquisitely made novellas of relationships at home and abroad, both historical and contemporary, we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her final days as a transplant to New York City; a vulnerable American grad student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title story, who gets more out of life than most of us; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high-school kid in the Midwest. These narratives dazzle on the surface with beautifully rendered settings and vistas, and dig deep psychologically. At every turn, Mary Gordon reveals in her characters’ interactions those crucial flashes of understanding that change lives forever. So richly developed it’s hard to believe they fit into novella-size packages, these tales carry us away both as individual stories and as a larger experience of Gordon’s literary mastery and human sympathy.
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The Liar's Wife: Four Novellas
by Mary Gordon
In the short novels that make up this beautiful collection, Mary Gordon presents a quartet of finely rendered, emotionally resonant stories. Here we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her last days as a transplant in New York City; a vulnerable American graduate student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title, who gets more out of life than most; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high schooler in the Midwest. At every turn, Gordon revels in the interactions and crucial flashes of understanding that change lives forever. Entrancing reading, The Liar’s Wife is a wonderful demonstration of Gordon’s literary mastery and human sympathy.
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The Love of My Youth: A Novel
by Mary Gordon
From the acclaimed author of Pearl and Final Payments comes a beautifully choreographed novel about first lovers meeting again after more than thirty years and reimmersing themselves in their shared past.
Miranda and Adam, high-school sweethearts now in their late fifties, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, a city where they once spent a summer deeply in love, living together blissfully. At an awkward reunion, the two—who parted in an atmosphere of passionate betrayal in the 1960s and haven’t seen each other since—are surprised to discover that they may have something to talk about. Both have their own guilt, their sense of who betrayed whom, and their long-held interpretation of the events that caused them not to marry and to split apart into the lives they’ve led since—both are married to others, with grown children. For the few weeks they are in Rome, Adam suggests that they meet for daily walks and get to know each other again. Gradually, as they take in the pleasures of the city and the drama of its streets, they discover not only what matters to them now but also more about what happened to them long ago.
Miranda and Adam are masterfully portrayed characters, intent upon understanding who they are in relation to who they were. A story about what first love means and how it is shattered, and the lessons old lovers may still have to share with each other many years later, The Love of My Youth is also a poignant look back at the hopes and dreams of a generation and what became of them.
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The Love of My Youth
by Mary Gordon
Miranda and Adam, high school sweethearts now in their late fifties, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, a city where they once spent a summer deeply in love. At an awkward reunion, Adam suggests that they meet for daily walks and get to know each other again. Both have their own sense of who betrayed whom and long-held interpretations of the events that caused them not to part. But gradually, as they take in the pleasures of the city and the drama of its streets, they discover not only what matters to them now but also what happened to them long ago. From acclaimed author Mary Gordon, The Love of My Youth is a poignant look at first love, at the hopes and dreams of a generation, and at what became of them.
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The Stories of Mary Gordon
by Mary Gordon
The masterly stories of Mary Gordon return us to the pleasure of this writer’s craft and to her monumental talent as an observer of character and of the ever-fading American Dream. These pieces encompass the pre- and postwar Irish American family life she circles in the early Temporary Shelter series, as well as a wealth of new fiction that brings her contemporary characters into middle age; it is their turn to face bodily decline, mortality, and the more complex anxieties of modern life. Gordon captures the sharp scent of feelings as they shift, the shape of particular lives in their hope and incomprehensibility.
In “The Neighborhood,” a seven-year-old who has lost her father finds birthday parties, with their noisy games and spun-sugar roses on fancy cakes, her greatest trial. “City Life” explores the dark side of Manhattan apartment living. “Intertextuality” proposes a dream meeting between Proust’s characters and the author’s aging grandmother. Throughout, Gordon’s surprising path to the center of a story is as much a part of the tale as the self-understanding her characters achieve in the process: “What were they all, any of them, feeling?” one narrator ventures. “This was the sort of question no one in my family would ask. Feelings were for others: the weak, the idle. We were people who got on with things.”
With their powerful insights into how we make do, both socially and privately, these stories are a treasure of American fiction. Each is a joy to read and a chance to savor Gordon’s clear vision: her ability to reveal at every turn what we need and what we wish for, and her willingness, always, to address what comes of such precious wishes.
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No copies available.
The Stories of Mary Gordon
by Mary Gordon
The stories of Mary Gordon return us to the pleasure of this writer's craft and to her monumental talent as an observer of character and of the ever-fading American Dream. These pieces encompass the pre- and postwar Irish American family life she circles in the early Temporary Shelter series, as well as a wealth of new fiction that brings her contemporary characters into middle age; it is their turn to face bodily decline, mortality, and the more complex anxieties of modern life. With their powerful insights into how we make do, both socially and privately, these stories are a treasure of American fiction.
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Circling My Mother: A Memoir
by Mary Gordon
In this triumphant return to nonfiction after two critically acclaimed works of fiction, Mary Gordon gives us a rich, bittersweet memoir about her mother, their relationship and her role as daughter.
Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, lived a life colored by large forces: immigration, world war, the Great Depression, and physical affliction--she contracted Polio at the age of 3 and experienced the ravages of both alcoholism and dementia. A hard-working single mother--Gordon’s father died when she was still a girl--Anna was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. Yet, even in the face of these setbacks, she managed hold down a job, to dress smartly and raise her daughter on her own, and though she was never a fan of the arts which so attracted Mary, she worshiped the beauty in life in her own way, with a surprising joie de vivre and a beautiful singing voice.
Gordon writes about Anna in all of her roles: sister, breadwinner, woman of faith and single mother. We discover Anna’s wry and often biting humor, her appreciation of life’s simple pleasures, her courage in breaking out of the narrow confines of her birth. Toward the end of Anna’s life, we watch the author take on all the burdens and blessings of caring for her mother in old age, beginning even then to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.
Bringing her exceptional talent for detail, character, and scene to bear on the life of her mother, Gordon gives us a deeply felt and powerfully moving book.
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Home: What It Means and Why It Matters
by Mary Gordon
Where do you live? The answer to this seemingly simple question can be more complicated than you'd think.
Drawing on personal experience, Mary Gordon examines various forms of abode-from her childhood house in Far Rockaway to apartments in Palo Alto, Rome, and the Upper West Side-as well as the very concept of ?home and how it has evolved over time. Rich in insightful observations from writers and thinkers as diverse as Gaston Bachelard, Le Corbusier, Emerson, Colette, and Edith Wharton, At Home skillfully provokes us to probe our own thoughts about what ?home truly means to each of us. Notions of safety, morality, cleanliness, comfort, and the changing nature of the family are just a few of the colors Gordon uses to paint an intriguing portrait of a place we all thought we knew.
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On Thomas Merton
by Mary Gordon
From the best-selling novelist and memoirist: a deeply personal view of her discovery of the celebrated modern monk and thinker through his writings.
“If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never have heard of him.”
So begins acclaimed author Mary Gordon in this probing, candid exploration of the man who became the face and voice of mid-twentieth-century American Catholicism. Approaching Merton “writer to writer,” Gordon illuminates his life and work through his letters, journals, autobiography, and fiction. Pope Francis has celebrated Merton as “a man of dialogue,” and here Gordon shows that the dialogue was as much internal as external—an unending conversation, and at times a heated conflict, between Merton the monk and Merton the writer.
Rich with excerpts from Merton’s own writing, On Thomas Merton produces an intimate portrait of a man who “lived life in all its imperfectability, reaching toward it in exaltation, pulling back in anguish, but insisting on the primacy of his praise as a man of God.”
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On Thomas Merton
by Mary Gordon
From the best-selling novelist and memoirist: a deeply personal view of her discovery of the celebrated modern monk and thinker through his writings.
“If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never have heard of him.”
So begins acclaimed author Mary Gordon in this probing, candid exploration of the man who became the face and voice of mid-twentieth-century American Catholicism. Approaching Merton “writer to writer,” Gordon illuminates his life and work through his letters, journals, autobiography, and fiction. Pope Francis has celebrated Merton as “a man of dialogue,” and here Gordon shows that the dialogue was as much internal as external—an unending conversation, and at times a heated conflict, between Merton the monk and Merton the writer.
Rich with excerpts from Merton’s own writing, On Thomas Merton produces an intimate portrait of a man who “lived life in all its imperfectability, reaching toward it in exaltation, pulling back in anguish, but insisting on the primacy of his praise as a man of God.”
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$18.95
There Your Heart Lies: A Novel
by Mary Gordon
From the award-winning novelist Mary Gordon, here is a book whose twentieth-century wisdom can help us understand the difficulties we face in the twenty-first: There Your Heart Lies is a deeply moving novel about an American woman’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War, the lessons she learned, and how her story will shape her granddaughter’s path.
Marian cut herself off from her wealthy, conservative Irish Catholic family when she volunteered during the Spanish Civil War—an experience she has always kept to herself. Now in her nineties, she shares her Rhode Island cottage with her granddaughter Amelia, a young woman of good heart but only a vague notion of life’s purpose. Their daily existence is intertwined with Marian’s secret past: the blow to her youthful idealism when she witnessed the brutalities on both sides of Franco’s war and the romance that left her trapped in Spain in perilous circumstances for nearly a decade. When Marian is diagnosed with cancer, she finally speaks about what happened to her during those years—personal and ethical challenges nearly unthinkable to Amelia’s millennial generation, as well as the unexpected gifts of true love and true friendship.
Marian’s story compels Amelia to make her own journey to Spain, to reconcile her grandmother’s past with her own uncertain future. With their exquisite female bond at its core, this novel, which explores how character is forged in a particular moment in history and passed down through the generations, is especially relevant in our own time. It is a call to arms—a call to speak honestly about evil when it is before us, and to speak equally about goodness.
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There Your Heart Lies: A Novel
by Mary Gordon
At nineteen, Marian Taylor cut herself off from her wealthy, conservative Irish Catholic family and left America to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War—an experience she has always kept to herself. Now in her nineties and diagnosed with cancer, Marian finally shares what happened to her during those years with her granddaughter Amelia, a young woman of good heart but only a vague notion of life’s purpose. Marian’s secret history—of personal and ethical challenges nearly unthinkable to Amelia’s generation, of the unexpected gifts of true love and true friendship—compels Amelia to make her own journey to Spain to reconcile her grandmother’s past with her own uncertain future. Moving and deeply felt, There Your Heart Lies explores how character is forged in a particular moment in history—and passed down through generations.
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Circling My Mother
by Mary Gordon
Bringing her exceptional talent for detail, character, and scene to bear on the life of her hard-working single mother, a bestselling author gives us a deeply felt and powerfully moving book about their relationship.
“A daring and perceptive work of memory, catharsis and literary grace.” —Los Angeles Times
Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. A hard-working single mother—Mary Gordon's father died when she was still a girl—she managed to hold down a job, dress smartly, raise her daughter on her own, and worship the beauty in life with a surprising joie de vivre.
Toward the end of Anna's life, we watch the author care for her mother in old age, beginning to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.
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The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father
by Mary Gordon
In The Shadow Man, the bestselling author of Final Payments and The Company of Women elevates the memoir into an uncompromising and unforgettable art form as she seeks to learn the truth about her lost father. 20 photos.
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Spending: A Novel
by Mary Gordon
Monica Szabo, a middle-aged, moderately successful painter, encounters B, a wealthy commodities broker who collects her work. B volunteers to be her muse, offering her everything that male artists have always had to produce great art: time, space, money, and sex.
Passionate, provocative, and highly engaging, Spending displays Gordon's maverick feminism, her extraordinary wit, and her unique perspectives on art, money, men, sex -- and the desires of women.
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