A darkly gripping portrait of an Irish-American family A multi-generational novel set over the course of a day, The Other Side centers on the journey of Vincent and Ellen MacNamara. Married for sixty-six years, the two have seen their share of hardships: emigration from Ireland to America; the bitter disappointments handed down to their children and grandchildren; and, most recently, setbacks to their health. In The Other Side, Vincent returns from...

Three masterful tales of women in the grips of complicated and dangerous loves The Rest of Life is comprised of three spellbinding novellas about women in love. In Immaculate Man, an agnostic New York divorcée finds herself in thrall to an unexpected passion for a Catholic priest-who is also desired by a former superior-and who becomes unmoored by the affair. Living at Home is set in London, and depicts the strange union between an English woman-a...

A collection of dazzling and thought-provoking essays from lauded author Mary Gordon Much acclaimed for her novels, Mary Gordon is also a brilliant and wide-ranging essayist. Gathering together twenty-eight of her forays into nonfiction, Good Boys and Dead Girls provides a richly autobiographical context for the themes that mark her fiction, such as Irish-American life, Catholicism, embattled families, and the redeeming power of art. Many of the pieces...

With her husband abroad, an art historian employs a devout but difficult nanny, unsettling her domestic life as well as her view of motherhood-and of herself When Anne Foster's husband accepts a yearlong teaching job in France, she decides to resume her own career in art history, which includes cataloging the work of a compelling and long-neglected painter, Caroline Watson. To care for her children, Anne employs the pious Laura Post. Though the young...

In the introduction to this remarkable book, Mary Gordon is riding in a taxi as the driver listens to a religious broadcast, and she reflects that, though a lifelong Christian, she is at odds with many others who identify themselves as Christians. In an effort to understand whether or not she had "invented a Jesus to fulfill my own wishes," she determined to read the Gospels as literature and to study Jesus as a character. What results is a vibrantly...

The author shares the life story of her mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon--a hard-working single mother whose life was shaped by polio, alcoholism, and dementia--and discusses their relationship and her role as a daughter.

Baron Frankenstein is blackmailed by Dr. Praetorious into reviving his monster and building a mate for it.