Alison Lurie

This Pulitzer Prize–winning novel follows two American academics in London—a young man and a middle-aged woman—as they each fall into unexpected romances.
In her early fifties, Vinnie Miner is the sort of woman no one ever notices, despite her career as an Ivy League professor. She doubts she could get a man’s attention if she waved a brightly colored object in front of him. And though she loves her work, her specialty—children’s...

A famous writer with cancer tries to commit suicide while on holiday in Florida, but each time fate intervenes to save him. Meanwhile his wife Jenny, who is some thirty years younger, discovers lesbian love. A look at old age.

When a wife reaches her breaking point and her husband begins an ill-advised affair, civil war breaks out within their family Erica Tate wouldn't mind getting up in the morning if she enjoyed her children more. Until puberty struck, Jeffrey and Matilda were absolute darlings, but in the last year, they have become sullen, insufferable little monsters. Erica's husband, Brian, is so deeply immersed in university life-and the legs of a half-literate...

In the midst of the Great Depression, two families spend a holiday weekend together-but while their daughters cement their friendship, their parents tear their marriages apart  Dozing in the back seat of her father's car, Mary Ann Hubbard is the happiest eight-year-old in the country. It's 1935, and she and her parents are going to spend Fourth of July weekend with her headmistress and the Zimmerns, whose daughter Lolly is Mary Ann's best friend...

Snowed in at the ivory-towered Convers College, a professor's wife searches for a thaw-and for her own liberation Though born in New York, the men of Emmy Turner's family have long found their spiritual home in the idyllic Convers College. Her father, brothers, and uncles entered the New England intellectual enclave as boys and came out men, ready to take on the challenges of the world. It is a pity, Emmy has always thought, that women are not allowed...

Offers a meditation on architecture and how it speaks to human experience, looking at what buildings and the spaces they contain say about the people who inhabit them, as well as the effects that those spaces have on them.

"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,...

When her little brother is taken away by the black geese belonging to the terrible witch, Baba Yaga, Elena searches for him in the great dark forest.