Alison Lurie, one of America's greatest novelists, has written a loving memoir of world-famous poet James Merrill and his longtime partner David Jackson. Drawing on her forty-year friendship with Merrill and Jackson, Lurie reveals the couple's deep involvement with ghosts, gods, and spirits, with whom they communicated through a Ouija board. Among the results of their intense twenty-year preoccupation with the occult is the brilliant book-length poem "The Changing Light at Sandover," which Merrill called his "chronicles of love and loss." Recalling Merrill and Jackson's life together...

Are some of the world's most talented children's book authors essentially children themselves? In this engaging series of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Lurie considers this theory, exploring children's classics from many eras and relating them to the authors who wrote them, including Little Women author Louisa May Alcott and Wizard of Oz author Frank Baum, as well as Dr. Seuss and Salman Rushdie. Analyzing these and many others, Lurie shows how these gifted writers have used children's literature to transfigure sorrow, nostalgia, and the struggles of their own...

Over the years, Alison Lurie has earned a devoted readership for her satiric wit and storytelling acumen. With Truth and Consequences, described by the New Yorker as "a comedy of adultery with a comedy of academia thrown in," Lurie returns with a modern social satire that recalls the best of David Lodge and Mary McCarthy as well as her own popular university novels The War Between the Tates and Foreign Affairs. BACKCOVER: "A wily, shapely tale of love's labors lost."
-Elle

"A wry, insightful, thoroughly enjoyable tale about how men and women choose...

In Don't Tell the Grown-Ups, one of our wittiest and most astute cultural commentators explores the world of children's literature -- from Lewis Carroll to Dr. Seuss, from classic fairy tales to A.A. Milne, from Beatrix Potter to J.R.R. Tolkien -- and shows that many of the most enduring books for children share a surprising quality: they challenge rather than uphold respectable adult values.

The author of The War Between the Tates and the Pulitzer prize-winning Foreign Affairs now brings her irresistible wit to the ghost story.
In nine spooky tales, Alison Lurie writes of women haunted by ghosts both literal and metaphorical: A woman about to marry Mr. Right is visited by the spirit of his first wife; a dead fiance haunts a foreign service officer every time she has an intimate moment with another man; the ghost of a girl in a Halloween costume disconcerts the perfect housewife. A secretary on a diet begins to see obese people everywhere she looks; a...

Generations of readers have traveled to Neverland and all the secret places of a child's heart. A story rich in adventure, humor, and sadness, J.M. Barrie's masterpiece remains a stirring call to flights of imagination.
With a magic and emotional appeal unmatched by any other story, Barrie's Peter Pan speaks directly to childhood's dreams and desires with an imaginative genius that evokes both laughter and tears. Peter, the boy would wouldn't grow up; Nana, the Darling children's nurse and pet Newfoundland; deliciously dreadful Captain Hook, who is stalked by a crocodile...

Sleeping beauties? Not Clever Gretchen or Kate Crackernuts or Manka or any of the other young heroines in this wonderful collection of folktales. Active, witty, brave, and resourceful, these girls and young women can fight and hunt, defeat giants, answer riddles, outwit the Devil, and rescue friends and family from all sorts of dangers and evil spells. These stories and many others like them were gathered by scholars from all the countries of Europe, but are usually left out of the popular collections of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when women were supposed to be beautiful,...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

Virginia Miner, a fifty-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children's folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel.

Also in London is Vinnie's colleague Fred Turner, a handsome, flat broke, newly separated, and thoroughly miserable young man trying to focus on his own...