In Cabin Six the half-dozen men and women--and one stowaway--who are passengers on the first American space shuttle for civilians are entering the space age as we all are, with our personal histories at our backs.Tom Gilpin, social reformer and cult hero; Veronica, the sexual explorer; Mulenberg,...
A complex masterpiece that reveals the mind of a contemporary woman beyond the confines of family, love, and duty to one’s selfLexie, a married woman with four children, undergoes a midlife crisis and questions her role as wife, mother, and lover. From within a Victorian house in the Hudson River...
Hortense Calisher’s revelatory novel of celebrity, small-town values, and a young woman’s coming of ageFamous playwright Craig Towle has decided to return to his New Jersey hometown, a suburb of New York City. He arrives with his world-renowned reputation and a new wife who is half his age. It is...
Hortense Calisher’s complex exploration of the journey of a young man whose intelligent observations cannot help him figure out his own directionReturning home to New York from Europe on his twenty-first birthday, draft-dodging narrator Bunty Bronstein is frustrated with his increasingly pompous ...
Carol Smith is incarcerated when the bomb her friends are constructing accidently goes off; twenty years later, finding herself addicted to drugs, she sets off to regain her memories, histories, and responsibilities and turn from her dependence on drugs.
Hortense Calisher's evocative memoir bristles with intelligence and youthful inquiry"Kissing Cousins" recalls the author as a teenager: peppy, earnest, and a bit self-important. Hortense Calisher documents her family's surprising history as Southern Jews adrift in New York. Finding her new city a...
Little fellow you’d never catch wearing elevator shoes. Or those two-hundred-dollar elephant-hide ones either. The car that drew up for them had a chauffeur in it, but wasn’t a limousine. Since Buddy had become an investment broker without leaving off being a lawyer, and had subsequently become a...
If social historians are to be trusted, the actual world behind the shadow play of Barsetshire was almost as immutably fixed in its rules and as limited by congenially narrow horizons as were Trollope’s characters. My own opinion, which is no more likely to be confirmed than other estimates of th...
And thank you for your note. But does any other nice New York girl of today, wanting to go where I do, ever have such a thing with her folks over it?—like I’m a Gibson girl wanting out to a bordello, from the Newport château. Or have to go through the social occasions I have? Once my aunt and unc...
Down there I could be smart without having to show it; unlike up North, you could just use it in your daily life. My mother, languid toward new dresses, had been admonished on her duty to the dressmaker—“We owe it to Miss DeVore.” Obligation was different from convention; fewer people—often nobod...
Hobbies ALTHOUGH THE AMPHITHEATER LENT to Linhouse for the occasion was a small one, it had all the usual properties of a rotunda, plus one. From his chair in the wings, looking past the large object—as yet he knew no other name for it—which he had managed to set mid-stage last evening, he had a ...
All of us—children of his sixties, with abolitionist consciences—knew that. The limits of his malice extended to flies, and to people who hit children or mistreated the helpless anywhere. His pocket was always to be picked by any applicant, and no matter how many times my mother, much more of a g...
By a woman Rupert has not seen for over thirty years and I have never met. Gertrude herself never phoned. Apparently that is not her way. If she has a way that she herself is aware of. Rupert says she used not to. We do not speak of her easily now. Who could? We took the bus. We no longer take th...
In the mother-pouch of her mind, so small a part then, so soon to swell, this fact was at once alerted. The dog’s nails on the bare floor made almost such a sound. Although the dog was just yawning awake, still in its padded bed, they half thought it this. Sooner or later, they would have looked ...
From the false dusk of the awning, Kinny, leaning out to watch the iridescent black top of the funeral car, smelled the indeterminate summer smell of freshly ironed linen and dust. Below, he could see his father help the aunts into the car and stumble in after them, and the car roll away to join ...
This is the morning the guerrillas will struggle down from the alps of childhood, onto the great divide. Royal’s asleep. It’s always a surprise to catch him at it. Charles watched. His younger brother sleeps like a man of affairs. Royal’s bad luck came early; now everything else can be arranged. ...
As one gets older, this happens to days generally, but on that particular one the friends were driving back upstate from the glassmakers’ studio in New Jersey, where they had gone for that private viewing, and now, no matter the weather they passed, the window’s high, fragile rainbow overhung the...
By this time, after six months of living alone in the little Waverly Place flat to which he had gone as soon as he and his wife had decided to separate, he had become all too well reacquainted with his own peculiar mechanism in regard to solitude. It was a mechanism that had its roots in the jumb...