A cheeky portrait of an old-fashioned young woman's assimilation into the modern worldSet in 1960s New York, this piquant coming-of-age story concerns a teenage girl, Queenie, raised to become a kept woman in an exceedingly comfortable and well-adjusted—yet insular and retrograde—household. After enrolling in college, Queenie confronts new understandings, both personal and political, and gradually becomes cognizant of the dated values imparted upon her. Bringing her trademark stylishness and a remarkable exuberance to Queenie, Hortense Calisher simultaneously pays homage to and updates the Victorian storytelling approach in capturing the intellectual and sexual breakthroughs of a contemporary young woman.

A finely observed and lovingly detailed portrait of a woman attempting to find a community and understand her own troubled historyAfter spending two decades in jails, psych wards, and halfway houses for her peripheral involvement in a radical students' bombing plot, thirty-six-year-old Carol Smith winds up squatting in a tattered space in Spanish Harlem. She spends the majority of her vagrant days socializing with her homeless neighbors, arguing with a testy social worker, and wandering the streets with Alphonse, a wayward South African wino and self-professed actor. Alphonse proves to be an inspiring force, and soon Carol is weaning herself off antidepressants as the sifting of her memories—mostly of her upbringing by two aunts in Massachusetts—creates a chance for redemption.

A unique novel of parents and children - and the spaces between them Dr. Niels Berners - a Swiss plastic surgeon living in New York - is struggling to recover from his dysfunctional son's abandonment of him. He joins a group of four other parents, all with absent children either in jail or in jeopardy, to discuss their feelings and seek a sense of community, comfort, and closure. Hortense Calisher artfully strings together tales of healing, brilliantly tracing the shadow of the generational gap. With compassion and precision, she paints the bruised egos of concerned parents confronting very empty nests.  

A humorous satire and loving tribute to science fiction that delves into the tenuous relationship between science and the humanities by asking, What does it mean to be human?A genderless alien from Ellipsia, a planet whose inhabitants have no concept of individuality, comes to Earth on an intergalactic exchange program to learn how to become human. To live here, the traveler must study and understand our inclinations for seeing people as distinct beings—the nature of gender, and at the heart of identity, the word I. At once funny and serious, Journal from Ellipsia offers a starkly objective view on our own humanity.

Two novellas from award-winning author Hortense Calisher offering very different journeys: the first looking hopefully forward, and the second, into a painful pastThe characters in these two novellas take introspective, poignant excursions both to where they want to be (The Railway Police) and where they have been (The Last Trolley Ride). In the first, a woman with hereditary premature baldness decides to embrace her unadorned head and hopes to start a fresh life without attachments to the trappings of days gone by. In the second, an elderly man with a working replica of a trolley line in his basement reminisces about the fateful last ride he took on that very line many years ago. In both stories, Calisher probes the characters’ senses of isolation from their respective worlds.Review“Miss Calisher’s style is . . . witty and ripe with insights.” —Saturday Review“Her work attracts because of her brilliant manipulation of language, her endlessly apt observation of character and behavior, and the sudden illuminating generalities with which she is not afraid to sprinkle her texts.” —The ReporterAbout the AuthorHortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties.A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.

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 Valley, Lexie dissects her life experiences in hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of her unhappiness. Through rich symbolism, lively dialogue, and acute commentary, Hortense Calisher conjures a cohesive map of Lexie's personal awakening.

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 the 1950s, and the new couple raises plenty of eyebrows—in particular, those of the narrator, an adolescent girl who is full of observations, but not judgments. At the center of this layered novel is the narrator's unconventional family and their odd fixation on Towle, which goes beyond his mere celebrity. The secrets of their past and the potential involvement of Towle in the family's lineage intertwine in a potentially devastating turn.

The recognition of failure and success is the theme of these eight short stories and the title novella from three-time National Book Award finalist Hortense CalisherExtreme Magic is Hortense Calisher's third collection of shorter works, after In the Absence of Angels (1951) and Tale for the Mirror (1962). Follow a drifting husband as he returns home and finds middle age in A Christmas Carillon. Listen with a daughter as she overhears a painful argument between her parents in The Gulf Between. Travel with a broken man as he heals after a tragic loss in Extreme Magic. Once again, Calisher captivates with her expressionistic prose and intricate characters.

Finalist for the National Book Award: Thirty-six stories by O. Henry Award–winning novelist Hortense CalisherThe Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher gathers short pieces that chart the author’s best-loved themes of mindful consciousness and social worlds. This collection includes one of her well-known New Yorker* stories, “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks,” in which a young man drops his mother off at a sanitarium and acquires a new friend who finally awakens him to the world. Also included are “The Sound of Waiting,” one of the chapters in the Elkin family saga; the chilling, Jamesian “The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street,” in which a New York widow hears a scream late one night but cannot decide how to investigate without appearing to her neighbors to have gone mad; and the nearly novella-length “The Summer Rebellion.”Review“These are stories that anyone will enjoy and after reading them will be anxious to go on to her novels and other writings.” —The Lewiston Daily Sun“The pride her characters take in their roots is as essential a theme as the moment of triumphant insight that so neatly rounds off Calisher’s crafted tales of very real people.” —Kirkus ReviewsAbout the AuthorHortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties.A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.

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, the businessman; William Wert, the diplomat who will be head man on arrival; Soraya, survivor of Iran's revolution; Lievering, possible survivor of the death camps--share all their secret histories. "Reader," says Tom Gilpin, "ride with us. Not for our sake alone, not for yours...(but) for the sake of that once gentle brown humus from which we all come."

In the vein of Eudora Welty and Charles Dickens, Hortense Calisher’s astounding first novel examines a young man’s detachment from the world—and his struggle to rejoin it Pierre Goodman enjoys an idyllic childhood as the son of a widowed dressmaker in post–World War I England. But paradise is ripped from him at age ten when he and his mother immigrate to a small town in Alabama. Yearning to regain peace within his own mind and aided by his photographic memory, he begins falsely but completely enveloping himself in the lives of others. He yearns to become not merely a listener to the world, but also a singer in its chorus. In doing so, Pierre’s life becomes an extraordinary document of his time and place as he finds himself a part of history over and over again. He testifies against the Klan in the Deep South, joins the navy during World War II, experiences love, and eventually finds his way back to England as an entirely changed man.

A study in motives, conflicts, ambitions, and fears as idealistic young newlyweds face unanticipated realitiesHortense Calisher's second novel is a multigenerational story of art, family, and marriage. Opening with Liz and David's wedding and chronicling the first four years of their life together, Calisher follows the couple through their evolution into erudite, antimaterialist artists. They move into a sparse downtown Manhattan loft, prideful of their rebellious choice to lead lives unfettered by possessions. As time passes, they realize that their unbridled optimism is slowly being abraded by the disappointments of reality. With the ambiguously pleasant news that Elizabeth's mother and David's father, both widowed, are finding new love together, Calisher further explores the couple's interplay and draws piercing parallels between the idealism of youth and the sagacity of old age.Textures of Life explores the nature of relationships and the shifts—both minute and...

With rare verve and panache, Calisher has confronted a difficult and ofter neglected subject, and has triumphed magnificently. Age is not only an important contribution to our understanding of the human predicament, it is a celebration of the human spirit--as only first -rate fiction can provide.

Description: 401 p. : 24 cm. Subjects: Calisher, Hortense --Novelists, American --20th century --Biography.

Hortense Calisher delivers another collection of provocative prose, on par with that of Henry James and John UpdikeA novella plus twelve short vignettes, Tale for the Mirror demonstrates Hortense Calisher's masterful use of language in an exploration of the human condition. In the title novella, a suburban man in the Hudson River Valley analyzes his life and discovers the importance of stories after a sage Indian mystic moves into his neighborhood.Laced with wit and pathos, the evocative shorter pieces include the galvanizing The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street, a textured tale of a widow who overhears an incident outside her window, compelling her to solve a mystery while coming to terms with her own loneliness in an unsentimental city. The Rehabilitation of Ginevra Leake is the farcical story of a homely girl from a proper Southern family who finds a home in the Communist party. In The Seacoast of Bohemia, a successful Manhattan man comes to terms with the fact that...