The daring debut of the Beat Generation's first woman novelist

It's 1955. Seven days before her graduation from Barnard College, Susan Levitt asks herself, "What if you lived your entire life without urgency?" just before going out to make things happen to her that will shatter the mask of conformity concealing her feelings of alienation. If Susan continues to be "good," marriage and security await her. But her hunger is rising for the self-discovery that comes from existential freedom.

After breaking up with the Columbia boy she knows she could marry, Susan...

The award-winning author of Minor Characters writes with delicious transparency about a love that cannot be harnessed and a woman who refuses to be deceived

In the great wave of husband-leaving ushered in by the Sexual Revolution, Molly Held frees herself from her cold, flagrantly unfaithful husband after their final quarrel turns violent. With her five-year-old son, she lights out for an Upper West Side apartment and the new life she hopes to find with Conrad Schwartzberg--the charismatic radical lawyer who has recently become her lover. Having escaped from a desert,...

From the award-winning author of Minor Characters comes a haunting novel about the persistence of love and the sustaining and destabilizing power of memories

In the vibrant downtown Manhattan art world of the 1960s, where men and women collide in "lucky and unlucky convergences," a series of love affairs has left Joanna Gold, a young photographer, feeling numbed. Then, at yet another party, a painter named Tom Murphy walks up to her. "Why do you hang back?" he asks.

Rather than another brief collision, their relationship is the profound and ecstatic love...