Delphinium Books – serie

In 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie published The Language of Clothes, a meditation on costume and fashion as an expression of history, social status and individual psychology. Amusing, enlightening and full of literary allusion, the book was highly praised and widely anthologized. Now Lurie has returned with a companion book, The Language of Houses, a lucid, provocative and entertaining look at how the architecture of buildings and the spaces within them both reflect and affect the people who inhabit them. Schools, churches, government buildings, museums, prisons, hospitals, restaurants, and of course, houses and apartments, all of them speak to human experience in vital and varied ways. The Language of Houses discusses historical and regional styles and the use of materials such as stone and wood and concrete, as well as contemplating the roles of stairs and mirrors, windows and doors, tiny rooms and cathedral-like expanses, illustrating its conclusions with illuminating literary references as well as the comments of experts in the field. This book, which is accompanied by light-hearted original drawings by Karen Sung, is an essential and highly entertaining new contribution to the literature of modern architecture.

In this candid and bluntly humorous collection of essays on a wide range of topics, Lurie begins with a portrait of her life at Radcliffe during World War II when the smartest women in the country were treated like second-class citizens, the most scholarly among them expected to work in factories to support the war effort. She moves on to her unheralded, clumsy attempts and near failure to be a writer and, finally having reached a level of recognition, the good fortune of forming close relationships with other writers and editors and great thinkers, including Robert Silver of The New York Review of Books, the poet James Merrill, and the illustrator, Edward Gorey. On this fascinating journey, we are amused by her insightful, often delightfully funny meditations on topics such as “deconstruction” and beloved children’s literature series such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter, and Babar. Words and Worlds is a crowning reminiscence from a much beloved and celebrated writer.

A woman retreats from academic life in New York City to manage a family goat farm in New England, a novel that Richard Russo calls “splendid and provides what I crave from all stories: vividly drawn characters worth spending time with and a richly rendered place for them to inhabit."  Lucy Richard has enjoyed a two-decade-long, successful career in public relations in New York City when she feels compelled to move back to rural Massachusetts to try to save her father’s farm. Returning to her childhood home at age 47 is hard enough, but the difficulties multiply once she’s settled in: her determination to raise dairy goats and make cheese is hampered at first by her total inexperience, and then by the sudden loss of her farming mentor. To make matters worse, her husband, Michael, who followed her to the farm reluctantly and who has made a disastrous financial decision, is suddenly in severely declining health. Lucy finds solace in Sandy, a girlhood companion who quickly becomes more than a friend, but their new intimacy places the Richard farm in the crosshairs of Sandy’s employer, a solar energy company. How Lucy contends with the precariousness—at once financial, physical and emotional— of her new life, and with the competing passions and obligations that grow within and around her, is at the heart of this intimate drama of love and loss, of desire and friendship, and of the alluring possibilities of second acts.

A vibrant novel that portrays the lives of an American woman fleeing the trauma of childhood abuse and an Iraqi refugee fleeing the trauma of war, each in the midst of childbirth, that Joyce Carol Oates praises as “breathtaking, heartrending, and finally uplifting” and Richard Ford declares “involved me so thoroughly that I began to anticipate how it would end.”Lorraine and Will, New Yorkers married for 15 years, are having their first baby, via IVF. They are 40, successful in their careers—finance and music—with pasts that have held each of them back from one another until the day While We Were Waiting unfolds: the day in the middle of Lorraine’s sixth month when she is rushed to the high-risk obstetrics unit of Met U Hospital. Over thenext hours Lorraine and Will, individually, are compelled to face themselves and their pasts in ways they’d never thought possible: Will struggling with the loss of a beloved mentor who perished with the World Trade Center; Lorraine, a musical prodigy dealing with the ongoing aftermath of betrayal and abuse.Sharing the waiting room with Will is Clement, an Iraqi archeologist newly arrived in America, having fled with his family from ISIS. He, too, struggles with trauma – from a murderous terrorist attack, from the high-risk delivery that his wife is enduring, and from a long-ago guilt that makes him fear for his laboring wife and their unborn child. As the space shared by Will and Clement expands with every hour and revelation. Lorraine’s labor compels her to let go of the grievous harm done to her in her youth, making While We Were Waiting a story about the imaginative power of acceptance and love.

From the award-winning author of In the Field, an inquiry into grief, love, housing affordability, and the transformative power of art, in the story of a young theater director who, after her mother’s death, stages Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in her childhood home.Gwen Rivlin moves back home to Philadelphia in the wake of her mother’s death, and into the big, shabby house with a turret where they both grew up. Her friends tell her it’s too expensive for a 27-year-old theater director, and too suburban if she has any hopes of keeping her social life alive.Gwen is determined to stay, even when her schemes to make the house more affordable run afoul of the single-family zoning laws and earn the disapproval of her neighbors. To smooth things over, and to assuage her own grief, Gwen stages a production of The Cherry Orchard inside the turret house. She casts friends, coworkers from the local coffee shop, and various community members in Anton Chekhov’s play about a family struggling to hold onto its own real estate.Through the creation of this beautiful and transitory work of art, Gwen heals old breaches, reevaluates her relationship with her difficult mother, and weaves a new, non-traditional family for herself.

A complex family drama with a Manhattan family court judge at its center.I Don’t Know How to Tell You This focuses on Judge Rachel Sugarman and her life both inside and outside the courtroom. Rachel is part of a close Jewish family whose lives are marked by significant emotional challenges, including the painful recognition that her beloved husband is slowly being diminished by memory loss, and the past trauma of her mother-in-law, a prickly Holocaust survivor who, in old age, continues to struggle with her grief. Rachel’s career as a judge and the power she wields in her courtroom offer an intimate look at a woman navigating what is still, in the 21st century, a profession most often dominated by men. The novel explores the very topical issues of child and spousal abuse, which color the dark undercurrent of the courtroom scenes. And though it reflects serious issues, there is very clearly a pitch-black comic sensibility at work throughout the novel.  By turns sad and touching and quirkily humorous, I Don’t Know How To Tell You This is vintage Marian Thurm.

In this candid and bluntly humorous collection of essays on a wide range of topics, Lurie begins with a portrait of her life at Radcliffe during World War II when the smartest women in the country were treated like second-class citizens, the most scholarly among them expected to work in factories to support the war effort. She moves on to her unheralded, clumsy attempts and near failure to be a writer and, finally having reached a level of recognition, the good fortune of forming close relationships with other writers and editors and great thinkers, including Robert Silver of The New York Review of Books, the poet James Merrill, and the illustrator, Edward Gorey. On this fascinating journey, we are amused by her insightful, often delightfully funny meditations on topics such as “deconstruction” and beloved children’s literature series such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter, and Babar. Words and Worlds is a crowning reminiscence from a much beloved and celebrated writer.

These stories (and one novella) arrive in the midst of the #Metoo movement. They examine the fallout from failed relationships between men and women, relationships that have crumbled under the weight of betrayal, misplaced hopes, illness―and in particular, from masculinity at its most toxic and misguided. A man in his mid-thirties receives a call from a woman he barely knew who informs him that a girl he bedded and dumped in high school has died of cancer. Another man who had an affair and left a woman without any warning finds himself working on a demolition job with a younger man who might be their son. Another man, obese for years, is left by his wife, loses weight and, drunk with the power of being finally fit, disastrously tries to reconnect with his former spouse. And in the title story of the collection, a woman summoned to the bedside of her son who has suffered a gunshot wound must finally come to terms with the serial infidelities of her charming ex-husband. These fictions ask very contemporary questions: how do ex-spouses learn to live again in proximity to one another; how do we make peace with our bodies and their own worst impulses; how do we learn to turn and face, full-on, the worst mistakes of our younger selves?