Amy Bloom - Böcker

Fall head over heels with this collection of unconventionaland heartfelt romances that will leave you longing for more. From icons offeminist literature to forgotten Chinese modernists, these women writers chartevolutions of love across lifetimes, from the first flush of youth to growingold together. This new anthology gathers the talents of Margaret Atwood,Virginia Woolf, Amy Bloom, E. M. Delafield, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Taylor,Mary Lavin, Ling Shuhua, Jessamyn West and Carol Shields.This anthology brings together forgotten and celebratedfemale masters of the short story format. In the spirit of the Women Writersseries, these stories first appeared in books and periodicals published in thetwentieth century. The result is a carefully curated collection of stories thatsketch evolving understandings of love and female agency, as their heroinesnavigate romance and commitment, idealism and realism, innocence andexperience.

Journalist, psychotherapist and novelist Amy Bloom explores sex and gender through portraits of people who are widely considered not normal - transsexuals, crossdressers, hermaphrodites - a group of people larger and more 'normal' than most of us would imagine. There are men like Hale, a 'regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy' with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender. Mothers like Jessie, who realised that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help him make the transgender transition. And couples like Peggy and her husband, 'Melanie', who holiday on cruise ships along with fellow heterosexual crossdressers. Bloom cuts through the psychology by showing us these people as they really are and in their own words. This intimate portrait reinvents the idea of sex, gender, and identity, and the very concept of being 'normal'.

This stunning collection of stories takes us into the inner worlds of families, the hidden corners of marriages and affairs and friendships, and introduces us to people whose lives are shaken and changed by love: a grieving mother in need of comfort; a frightened father in need of redemption; wives who become mistresses and regret it, or don’t; a psychiatrist crashing through professional boundaries to provide for her husband and son.Amy Bloom holds her characters close to us as they encounter the everyday mysteries of need and desire, showing us tenderness and humour in the midst of grief and sorrow. She writes the kind of fiction that celebrates the flawed dignity of the human and reminds us all of the fine venture of living in grace and hope in the worlds we are born to and make.

In 1933, President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt took up residence in the White House. With them went the celebrated journalist Lorena Hickok - Hick to friends - a straight-talking reporter from South Dakota, whose passionate relationship with the idealistic, patrician First Lady would shape the rest of their lives. Told by the indomitable Hick, White Houses is the story of Eleanor and Hick's hidden love, and of Hick's unlikely journey from her dirt-poor childhood to the centre of privilege and power. Filled with fascinating back-room politics, the secrets and scandals of the era, and exploring the potency of enduring love, it is an imaginative tour-de-force from a writer of extraordinary and exuberant talent.

Amy Bloom has long been regarded as a master of the short story form. Here, her brilliance shines across two decades and more than twenty-five stories. From the bereaved widow who finds unexpected comfort in 'Sleepwalking', to the matchmaking shrink in 'Psychoanalysis Changed My Life'; from the teenage girl furious at her dying mother in 'Hold Tight' to the transgressive lovers of 'The Gates Are Closing'; from the married friends irresistibly drawn to one another in 'William and Clare' to the brave and heartless girl in 'Permafrost' - these are stories brimming with life and grief, erotically charged and beautifully crafted.

Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize for Non-Fiction 2023New York Times BestsellerA poignant love letter to Bloom's husband and a passionate outpouring of grief, In Love reaffirms the power and value of human relationships.In January 2020, Amy Bloom travelled with her husband Brian to Switzerland, where he was helped by Dignitas to end his life while Amy sat with him and held his hand. Brian was terminally ill and for the last year of his life Amy had struggled to find a way to support his wish to take control of his death, to not submerge 'into the darkness of an expiring existence'. Written with piercing insight and wit, In Love is Bloom's intimate, authentic and startling account of losing Brian, first slowly to the disease of Alzheimer's, and then on becoming a widow. It charts the anxiety and pain of the process that led them to Dignitas, while never avoiding the complex ethical problems that are raised by assisted death.'Poignant, kind, funny and ultimately redemptive' - Alain de Botton, author of The Course of Love'In Love is a thrillingly beautiful, laser-eyed book about love, life, mortality and, most remarkably, about the ways in which no one of the three can be separated from the others' - Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and A Home at the End of the World

Emigrating alone from Paris to New York after World War II, a young girl Gazala befriends two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala's beloved brother Samir joins her in Manhattan, this inseparable foursome becomes the beating heart of an untraditional, multigenerational family. The decades are marked by erupting passions within everyday life. Gazala and Samir make a home together, Alma loses a baby, Anne leaves her husband for his sister and her restless daughter grows up to raise a child on her own. The four friends stand by one another through it all, steadfastly unapologetic about their authentic desires and the unorthodox family they have created. Compassionate and full of warmth and humour, I'll Be Right Here embraces the complexity and richness of humanity and the mysterious ways we evolve as we love - and the ways we hope to be loved in return.

Emigrating alone from Paris to New York after World War II, a young girl Gazala befriends two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala's beloved brother Samir joins her in Manhattan, this inseparable foursome becomes the beating heart of an untraditional, multigenerational family. The decades are marked by erupting passions within everyday life. Gazala and Samir make a home together, Alma loses a baby, Anne leaves her husband for his sister and her restless daughter grows up to raise a child on her own. The four friends stand by one another through it all, steadfastly unapologetic about their authentic desires and the unorthodox family they have created. Compassionate and full of warmth and humour, I'll Be Right Here embraces the complexity and richness of humanity and the mysterious ways we evolve as we love - and the ways we hope to be loved in return.

Emigrating alone from Paris to New York after World War II, a young girl Gazala befriends two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala's beloved brother Samir joins her in Manhattan, this inseparable foursome becomes the beating heart of an untraditional, multigenerational family.The decades are marked by erupting passions within everyday life. Gazala and Samir make a home together, Alma loses a baby, Anne leaves her husband for his sister and her restless daughter grows up to raise a child on her own. The four friends stand by one another through it all, steadfastly unapologetic about their authentic desires and the unorthodox family they have created. Compassionate and full of warmth and humour, I'll Be Right Here embraces the complexity and richness of humanity and the mysterious ways we evolve as we love - and the ways we hope to be loved in return.

Amy Bloom's Away revitalizes the American road-trip novel from the perspective of a vulnerable but spirited woman. It paints a vivid, earthy and surprising picture of 1920s America, its smells and textures, its population of drifters and con artists, pimps and prostitutes. Away is storytelling at its finest - epic in sweep, but intimate and psychologically acute, moving but unsentimental. Like the novels of Sarah Waters, it is both richly authentic in its period detail and fresh and contemporary in its style. But, above all, Bloom has created an unforgettable character in Lillian Leyb - her voice, haunted, damaged yet innocent, passionate, witty and unpretentious, is so believable and strong that her presence lingers long after the novel ends.

When Eva's mother abandons her on Iris's front porch, the girls don't seem to have much in common - except, they soon discover, a father. Thrown together with no mothers to care for them and a father who could not be considered a parent, Iris and Eva become one another's family. Iris wants to be a movie star; Eva is her sidekick. Together, they journey across 1940s America from scandal in Hollywood to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island, stumbling, cheating and loving their way through a landscape of war, betrayals and big dreams.

In 1933, President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt took up residence in the White House. With them went the celebrated journalist Lorena Hickok - Hick to friends - a straight-talking reporter from South Dakota, whose passionate relationship with the idealistic, patrician First Lady would shape the rest of their lives. Told by the indomitable Hick, White Houses is the story of Eleanor and Hick's hidden love, and of Hick's unlikely journey from her dirt-poor childhood to the centre of privilege and power. Filled with fascinating back-room politics, the secrets and scandals of the era, and exploring the potency of enduring love, it is an imaginative tour-de-force from a writer of extraordinary and exuberant talent.

Amy Bloom's Away revitalizes the American road-trip novel from the perspective of a vulnerable but spirited woman. It paints a vivid, earthy and surprising picture of 1920s America, its smells and textures, its population of drifters and con artists, pimps and prostitutes. Away is storytelling at its finest - epic in sweep, but intimate and psychologically acute, moving but unsentimental. Like the novels of Sarah Waters, it is both richly authentic in its period detail and fresh and contemporary in its style. But, above all, Bloom has created an unforgettable character in Lillian Leyb - her voice, haunted, damaged yet innocent, passionate, witty and unpretentious, is so believable and strong that her presence lingers long after the novel ends.

A young woman struggles to come to terms with her friend's murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the most unlikely of places; a daughter returns to her hated father's house to care for him in his final days and discovers an unexpected bond; and, in a set of interlocking stories, two middle-aged friends, married to others, find themselves irresistibly sexually drawn to one another. In this sensuous, funny and heartbreaking new book, Amy Bloom explores the unexpected patterns that love, and its absence, weave into our lives. With her generous and clear-eyed understanding of human complexity and contrariness, the award-winning author introduces us to some of her most unforgettable characters yet.

When Eva's mother abandons her on Iris's front porch, the girls don't seem to have much in common - except, they soon discover, a father. Thrown together with no mothers to care for them and a father who could not be considered a parent, Iris and Eva become one another's family. Iris wants to be a movie star; Eva is her sidekick. Together, they journey across 1940s America from scandal in Hollywood to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island, stumbling, cheating and loving their way through a landscape of war, betrayals and big dreams.