MARY GORDON

From the award-winning author, a novel about an American woman´s experiences during the Spanish Civil War and how her story shapes her granddaughter´s path.

In the short novels that make up this beautiful collection, Mary Gordon presents a quartet of finely rendered, emotionally resonant stories. Here we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her last days as a transplant in New York City; a vulnerable American graduate student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title, who gets more out of life than most; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high schooler in the Midwest. At every turn, Gordon revels in the interactions and crucial flashes of understanding that change lives forever. Entrancing reading, "The Liar s Wife" is a wonderful demonstration of Gordon s literary mastery and human sympathy."

Anna Galiano Gordon, la madre de la gran escritora estadounidense Mary Gordon, murió en 2002 a los 94 años, tras pasar por la experiencia de la inmigración, la guerra mundial, la Gran Depresión, una enfermedad durante la infancia-la polio- de la que se salvaria pero que la dejaria secuelas en su fisico, y, ya en la madurez, episodios de alcoholismo que la conducirian a la amargura. Su hija, Mary gordon, se propone escribir un libro sobre ella, abarcando todas las facetas de su personalidad: hija, hermana, cabeza de familia, mujer con un hombre sin pasar por el matrimonio y madre soltera. Descubrimos el humor sardonico de Anna, su amor por los placeres simples de la vida, su coraje para eludir la estrechez de miras del clan familiar en una epoca de constantes cambios sociales y culturales. Con su excepcional talento para dotar de vida a los personajes, recrar ambientes y bucear en los mas hondos sentimientos humanos, Mary Gordon, al intentar recobrar la figura de su madre muerta, ha escrito un libro profundamente emotivo e impactante.

Cuarenta y un cuentos como puñetazos en el estómago. Una madre que teme dejar solo a su hijo, una anciana que recorre las calles de Nápoles en busca de un amor de juventud… Mary Gordon es capaz de mo

Mary Gordon, bestselling author of Spending and The Shadow Man, investigates the role that place plays in the formation of identity -- the connections between how we experience place and how we become ourselves. From her grandmothers house, which stood at the center of her childhood life, to a rented house on Cape Cod, where she began to mature as a writer, Mary Gordon navigates the reader through these spaces and worlds with subtlety and style. Wise, humorous, and intelligent, Seeing Through Places illuminates the relationship between the physical, emotional, and intellectual architectures of our lives, showing us the far-reaching power that places ultimately have in influencing a life.

A Vintage Shorts Short Story Month Original Selection Brave, intelligent, fierceeighteen-year-old Silvia knows how to handle men. When she discovered that her Salsa-dancing fathers been hiding an affair, she threw him out of the apartment she shared with her mother and changed the locks. But, Will is just so unlike the men that Silvia has known. He is privileged, irritating, and handsome. He wears disheveled clothes, never washes his tub, almost never eats sugar, and talks about faith and love. When Silvia falls ill, he takes gentle care of her until she recovers. And, when she gets an invitation to her fathers 50th birthday, Will urges her to go and offer a second chance to the one man she swore she would never forgive. In this entrancing and masterful new story, award-winning writer Mary Gordon beautifully lays bare the passions and torments of a fearless young woman struggling with her heritage and impossibly torn between two men and the two very different worlds they inhabit. An ebook short.

From the best-selling novelist and memoirist: a deeply personal view of her discovery of the celebrated modern monk and thinker through his writings.If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never have heard of him.So begins acclaimed author Mary Gordon in this probing, candid exploration of the man who became the face and voice of mid-twentieth-century American Catholicism. Approaching Merton writer to writer, Gordon illuminates his life and work through his letters, journals, autobiography, and fiction. Pope Francis has celebrated Merton as a man of dialogue, and here Gordon shows that the dialogue was as much internal as externalan unending conversation, and at times a heated conflict, between Merton the monk and Merton the writer. Rich with excerpts from Mertons own writing, On Thomas Merton produces an intimate portrait of a man who lived life in all its imperfectability, reaching toward it in exaltation, pulling back in anguish, but insisting on the primacy of his praise as a man of God.

Bringing her exceptional talent for detail, character, and scene to bear on the life of her hard-working single mother, a bestselling author gives us a deeply felt and powerfully moving book about their relationship.A daring and perceptive work of memory, catharsis and literary grace. Los Angeles TimesAnna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. A hard-working single motherMary Gordons father died when she was still a girlshe managed to hold down a job, dress smartly, raise her daughter on her own, and worship the beauty in life with a surprising joie de vivre. Toward the end of Annas life, we watch the author care for her mother in old age, beginning to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.

The stories of Mary Gordon return us to the pleasure of this writers craft and to her monumental talent as an observer of character and of the ever-fading American Dream. These pieces encompass the pre- and postwar Irish American family life she circles in the early Temporary Shelter series, as well as a wealth of new fiction that brings her contemporary characters into middle age; it is their turn to face bodily decline, mortality, and the more complex anxieties of modern life. With their powerful insights into how we make do, both socially and privately, these stories are a treasure of American fiction.

On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politicsnor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself? Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend (and Pearls surrogate father), Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearls side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, shetakes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Irelands tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.

The award-winning author at her storytelling best: four compelling novellas of Americans in Europe and Europeans in America. In these absorbing and exquisitely made novellas of relationships at home and abroad, both historical and contemporary, we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her final days as a transplant to New York City; a vulnerable American grad student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title story, who gets more out of life than most of us; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high-school kid in the Midwest. These narratives dazzle on the surface with beautifully rendered settings and vistas, and dig deep psychologically. At every turn, Mary Gordon reveals in her characters interactions those crucial flashes of understanding that change lives forever. So richly developed its hard to believe they fit into novella-size packages, these tales carry us away both as individual stories and as a larger experience of Gordons literary mastery and human sympathy.This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Reading Jesus is a personal journey through the fundamental Biblical stories. As celebrated author Mary Gordon ponders the intense strangeness of a deity in human form, unresolved moral ambiguities within the text, and the problem posed to her as an enlightened reader by the miracle of the Resurrection. What she rediscoversand reinterprets with her signature candor, intelligence, and straightforwardnessis a rich store of overlapping, sometimes conflicting teachings that feel both familiar and tantalizingly elusive.

From the acclaimed author of Pearl and Final Payments comes a beautifully choreographed novel about first lovers meeting again after more than thirty years and reimmersing themselves in their shared past. Miranda and Adam, high-school sweethearts now in their late fifties, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, a city where they once spent a summer deeply in love, living together blissfully. At an awkward reunion, the twowho parted in an atmosphere of passionate betrayal in the 1960s and havent seen each other sinceare surprised to discover that they may have something to talk about. Both have their own guilt, their sense of who betrayed whom, and their long-held interpretation of the events that caused them not to marry and to split apart into the lives theyve led sinceboth are married to others, with grown children. For the few weeks they are in Rome, Adam suggests that they meet for daily walks and get to know each other again. Gradually, as they take in the pleasures of the city and the drama of its streets, they discover not only what matters to them now but also more about what happened to them long ago. Miranda and Adam are masterfully portrayed characters, intent upon understanding who they are in relation to who they were. A story about what first love means and how it is shattered, and the lessons old lovers may still have to share with each other many years later, The Love of My Youth is also a poignant look back at the hopes and dreams of a generation and what became of them.

"A master of the story form" (The New York Times) offers a fresh, revealing portrait of the legendary saint Celebrated novelist Mary Gordon brings Joan of Arc alive as a complex figure full of contradictions and desires, as well as spiritual devotion. A humble peasant girl, Joan transformed herself into the legendary Maid of Orleans, knight, martyr, and saint. Following the voice of God, she led an army to victory and crowned the king of France, only to be captured and burned at the stake as a hereticall by the age of nineteen. Gordon does more than tell this gripping storyshe explores Joans mystery and the many facets of her inspiring life.

At nineteen, Marian Taylor cut herself off from her wealthy, conservative Irish Catholic family and left America to volunteer in the Spanish Civil Waran experience she has always kept to herself. Now in her nineties and diagnosed with cancer, Marian finally shares what happened to her during those years with her granddaughter Amelia, a young woman of good heart but only a vague notion of lifes purpose. Marians secret historyof personal and ethical challenges nearly unthinkable to Amelias generation, of the unexpected gifts of true love and true friendshipcompels Amelia to make her own journey to Spain to reconcile her grandmothers past with her own uncertain future. Moving and deeply felt, There Your Heart Lies explores how character is forged in a particular moment in historyand passed down through generations.