Books by Sallie Bingham

Hub of the Miracle

by Sallie Bingham

Sallie Bingham's poems seek, always, to connect. The events of ordinary life-walking in the woods around Santa Fe, lighting a fire in a stove-merge with the crises of maturity: death and other losses. Always, the tonic is hope-the hope that springs from a stone, a stream, or a memory of childhood. These short lyrics provide inspiration for all travelers on the path.

Nick of Time (Softcover)

by Sallie Bingham

Melanie is a dancer-the most unlikely dancer in the world, a woman who has had a hard life, waitressing, raising a son alone, putting up with an abusive husband. Late in life, she decides to pursue one dream, a dream she can't afford, which her husband opposes: she will become a skilled ballroom dancer, moving to the old love songs that have never applied to her life. And she wants to learn to lead! As she takes lessons, scrapes up the money to pay for costumes, and prepares for her first competition, she faces increasing opposition. But she persists, entering the glamorous, demanding world of professional dancing with an innocence and a determination that will change her life.

Cory's Feast (Softcover)

by Sallie Bingham

Cory is a middle-aged Easterner, long-divorced, energetic and fearlessly sensual. Pursuing a dream she has nursed for years, she moves to Taos, New Mexico and buys a famous old house and, in the tradition of its previous owner, turns it into a crucible for the transformation of her guests. Eccentric and charming, with a lover from the Pueblo and lots of turquoise and broomstick skirts, Cory finds her guests, mainly skiers and tourists, bewildered by her particular philosophy, which she calls 'The School of As-If.' Then her long-time friend is found murdered and Cory is suspicious of the local police's half-hearted attempts to find the murderer. Involving herself in trying to solve the case, her unleashed power leads to surprising and even terrifying results. Part murder mystery, part adventure, this ground-breaking novel traces the mature lives of Cory and her much more conventional sister Apple, who first appeared in the author's Matron of Honor, described by Publishers Weekly as 'A powerful novel, her best yet.'

Red Car: Stories

by Sallie Bingham

“[Sallie] Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and transgressive.”—Paula Fox
“Restrained and wise, these lovely stories unfold like lavender-scented linens, quieting the fretful mind.”—Joe Ashby Porter
Forty-year veteran of the novel, noted feminist, and author of over ten books, Sallie Bingham returns with Red Car, a collection written in her signature style—discreet, sly prose circling taboo subjects. Her new offering is about love enjoyed, whether alone or with lovers, sensual or familial, comedic or tragic, often with a wry twist.
Sallie Bingham lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Mending: New and Selected Stories

by Sallie Bingham

Praise for Sallie Bingham:
"Sallie Bingham binds her collection together with sheer talent. The title novella is absolutely first-rate—a skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty. This same unblinking gaze is hard at work on the essential weakness and dependence of men ('The Banks of the Ohio' and 'The Ice Party'), the illusion of freedom that comes with divorce ('Bare Bones'), and the desperate terror of adolescent love ('Winter Term')."—James R. Frakes, The New York Times Book Review
"Sallie Bingham's characters scrutinize their relationships with children, lovers, and their own treacherous souls. . . . Nearly every one of these flinty stories is a tiny masterpiece."—Entertainment Weekly
"Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. . . . There is not a false note in Bingham's striking collection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"These engaging tales span landscape, gender, and age, and readers will treasure Bingham's strikingly perceptive composition and refined, clever flashes of detail and clarity."—Booklist
Sallie Bingham published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.

The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters

by Sallie Bingham

This family history centered around three women from three generations spans the Civil War through the Jazz Age. Fans of Sallie Bingham's work will especially appreciate her parents Mary and Barry's romance that unfolds in letters and finally results in marriage. Bingham beautifully demonstrates an inheritance of emotion, morality, ideology, and most lasting of all, irreverence.
Sallie Bingham has published four short story collections, four novels, a memoir, and several plays. Bingham was a director of the National Book Critics Circle, and founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Sallie Bingham Archive for Women's Papers and Culture at Duke University.

Transgressions: Stories

by Sallie Bingham

"Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and—transgressive."—Paula Fox
"These are marvelous stories of experience and have the ripeness of wry, hard-won wisdom."—Phillip Lopate
"Bingham has the eye to see where a story lives, the heart to understand it, and the voice—and craft—to tell it."—Robin Morgan In her wise and sexy new collection, Sallie Bingham examines modern-day "transgressions" in affairs of the heart. She offers up a ménage à trois, an older woman’s affair with a student, a painter who uses his age as an excuse to behave indecorously. But the reader quickly discovers the real transgressions are those of the self against the self.

Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow, Sallie Bingham

Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow, Sallie Bingham

Readers familiar with Sallie Bingham’s 1989 memoir, Passion and Prejudice, will remember her provocative chronicle of the Bingham family saga, cited by Gloria Steinem as “a major step toward feminist change and democracy.”

In Little Brother, she reflects on just one of her siblings: the youngest son Jonathan and his all-too brief life. The book begins with a count she calls her “dreadful list” of nine close relatives who died by accident, suicide, overdose, exposure to the elements, and electrocution, all before the age of 50. Jonathan was only twenty-two years old when he climbed a pole, hoping to rig up some lighting for a barn party and, by some fluke, grabbed a live wire. But even before his fatal fall to the ground, the boy suffered from insecurity, isolation, and difficulty relating to his large family. Bingham draws from archived material, chief among them the young man’s journal and letters. She writes his short history with obvious affection and tenderness, along with more than a dash of survival guilt. Little Brother is a moving and honest new work.

The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke

by Sallie Bingham

"Men who inherit great wealth are respected, but women who do the same are ridiculed. In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham rescues Doris Duke from this gendered prison and shows us just how brave, rebellious, and creative this unique woman really was, and how her generosity benefits us to this day.” ―Gloria Steinem

A bold portrait of Doris Duke, the defiant and notorious tobacco heiress who was perhaps the greatest modern woman philanthropist

In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham chronicles one of the great underexplored lives of the twentieth century and the very archetype of the modern woman. “Don’t touch that girl, she’ll burn your fingers,” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover once said about Doris Duke, the inheritor of James Buchanan Duke’s billion-dollar tobacco fortune. During her lifetime, she would be blamed for scorching many, including her mother and various ex-lovers. She established her first foundation when she was twenty-one; cultivated friendships with the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Imelda Marcos, and Michael Jackson; flaunted interracial relationships; and adopted a thirty-two year-old woman she believed to be the reincarnation of her deceased daughter. This is also the story of the great houses she inhabited, including the classically proportioned limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue, the sprawling Duke Farms in New Jersey, the Gilded Age mansion Rough Point in Newport, Shangri La in Honolulu, and Falcon’s Lair overlooking Beverly Hills.

Even though Duke was the subject of constant scrutiny, little beyond the tabloid accounts of her behavior has been publicly known. In 2012, when eight hundred linear feet of her personal papers were made available, Sallie Bingham set out to probe her identity. She found an alluring woman whose life was forged in the Jazz Age, who was not only an early war correspondent but also an environmentalist, a surfer, a collector of Islamic art, a savvy businesswoman who tripled her father’s fortune, and a major philanthropist with wide-ranging passions from dance to historic preservation to human rights.

In The Silver Swan, Bingham is especially interested in dissecting the stereotypes that have defined Duke’s story while also confronting the disturbing questions that cleave to her legacy.

How Daddy Lost His Ear And Other Stories

by Sallie Bingham

Four generations of an extended mixed-race family live with the problems we've all heard about, yet thrive amidst hardship, turning the myth of the Old West on its head.

Prize-winning story writer Sallie Bingham's latest group of tales reverse commonly held assumptions about the American West. The Hispanic, Native, and white members of this rough and tumble family pivot around an outrageously funny and fallible rodeo rider known as Cowboy. They live with alcohol and drug addiction, dependency on a fraying welfare system, poverty, violence, and deep-held loyalties. Unlikely learning and unlikely sources of wisdom abound. "During those long winter nights when Dad took off for Sheridan--no liquor allowed on the rez but Sheridan is only about twenty miles west," Fat Annie tells the boy known as Sure Enough some truths about women that will guide him for the rest of his life. Running away on horseback from the imposition of ashes at his Jesuit boarding school, eleven-year-old Jimmy James finds "this little lady priest" in the town park. She makes the cross with ashes on his horse's head, then turns to him, and he feels the cross "burn into him worse than any brand." A bizarre accident in "How Daddy Lost His Ear" results in an equally bizarre wedding. And one of the many "white ladies" who appear briefly and disappear fast finally gets Cowboy to tell the truth.

These men, women, and kids don't just endure. They thrive in their own peculiar style, turning seemingly tragic outcomes into sources of madcap humor, and nourishing indelible family ties. This is the West as it was and is, a complex web of traditions and surprising, even shocking, ways of finding triumph.