Mrs. Abigail Fisher, the South's Esteemed First Lady of Letters, is in a rut. Her writing career has collapsed, and she has become an embittered old woman living alone in a dilapidated house in Georgia. Only she's not as alone as she thinks. One of her characters, Pistachio Simmons, who had been cut from Mrs. Fisher's best-selling novel, The Garden of Gethsemane, Georgia, has returned to demand she be given the storyline she deserves. After Pistachio starts a fire in the kitchen, Mrs. Fisher is forced to summon her estranged daughter, Elise, back home. When Pistachio finds the deleted pages...

A novel of San Francisco. On the eve of the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, Helen and Frank Connor arrive in San Francisco to determine the fate of their marriage. A series of unexplainable events sends the couple in separate directions deep into the ghosts of the City's past, which include the fierce, fiddle-playing Elle, who accidentally jumped to her death in 1967 and is now back to reclaim her lost instrument, pulling along with her all the men who stopped their lives for her. This ensemble novel is peppered with classic San Francisco characters like Remmy X, an old hippie...

What if writer's block became your most precious teacher? An empowering new process for writers who struggle with the seemingly insurmountable middle of a project, from the author of Writing Begins with the Breath.

Writer's block. If you are a writer, you know it can be a haunting, terrifying force--a wolf at the door, a vast conspiracy, something that keeps you up at night, spinning your wheels, going nowhere. But what if we've been thinking about writer's block all wrong? What if, by paying attention to its qualities and inquiring into its hidden gifts, we...