"The beloved author at her storytelling best: four wonderful novellas of Americans abroad 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...

A collection of dazzling and thought-provoking essays from lauded author Mary Gordon Much acclaimed for her novels, Mary Gordon is also a brilliant and wide-ranging essayist. Gathering together twenty-eight of her forays into nonfiction, Good Boys and Dead Girls provides a richly autobiographical context for the themes that mark her fiction, such as Irish-American life, Catholicism, embattled families, and the redeeming power of art. Many of the pieces...

Mary Gordon's extraordinary novel about a young Catholic woman who pursues father figures-only to wrestle to break free of them Felicitas Maria Taylor was brought up in a cocoon, raised by five devoutly religious women. The death of her father while she was still a baby has caused her to seek out the extreme in men, and that is what she finds in Father Cyprian, a priest whom Felicitas visits during summers in upstate New York. The charismatic Cyprian...

Three masterful tales of women in the grips of complicated and dangerous loves The Rest of Life is comprised of three spellbinding novellas about women in love. In Immaculate Man, an agnostic New York divorcée finds herself in thrall to an unexpected passion for a Catholic priest-who is also desired by a former superior-and who becomes unmoored by the affair. Living at Home is set in London, and depicts the strange union between an English woman-a...

With her husband abroad, an art historian employs a devout but difficult nanny, unsettling her domestic life as well as her view of motherhood-and of herself When Anne Foster's husband accepts a yearlong teaching job in France, she decides to resume her own career in art history, which includes cataloging the work of a compelling and long-neglected painter, Caroline Watson. To care for her children, Anne employs the pious Laura Post. Though the young...

Roots of empathy-an evidence-based program developed in 1996 by longtime educator and social entrepreneur Mary Gordon-has already reached more than 270,000 children in Canada, the U.S., Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. Now, as the New York Times reports that "empathy lessons are spreading everywhere amid concerns over the pressure on students from high-stakes tests and a race to college that starts in kindergarten," Mary Gordon explains...

An exploration of Thomas Merton, 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--Adapted from jacket

Presents a selection of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources

One of The Guardian’s “1,000 Books to Read Before You Die”
This underrated classic of contemporary Irish literature tells the “utterly transfixing” story of a lonely, poverty-stricken spinster in 1950s Belfast (The Boston Globe)
Judith Hearne is an unmarried woman of a certain age who has come down in society. She has few skills and is full of the prejudices...