A novel that examines aging and marriage with sincerity and insight Rupert and Gemma, an elderly couple still very much in love, know that death will inevitably come for one of them before taking the other, so they keep private journals to ensure that the survivor's mate will never truly be gone, living on instead through his or her words. Age is the narrative of Rupert and Gemma's lives: their similarities, their differences, and the ways in which...

A finely observed and lovingly detailed portrait of a woman attempting to find a community and understand her own troubled history After 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...

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 and school boorish, the young Calisher takes solace in the enduring friendship she develops with Katie Pyle, a gregarious nurse turned "kissing cousin" fifteen...