Showing results by author "Mary Gordon" in All Categories

Monica Szabo, a middle-aged, moderately successful painter, encounters B, a wealthy commodities broker who collects her work. B volunteers to be her muse, offering her everything that male artists have always had to produce great art: time, space, money, and sex. (He is even willing to pose for her.)Soon after she and B become lovers, Monica starts work on a controversial new series of paintings based on her perception that the deposed Christs of Renaissance art were not dead, but post orgasmic.

When Isabel Moore's father dies, she finds herself, at the age of 30, suddenly freed from eleven years of uninterrupted care for a helpless man. With all the patterns of her life suddenly rendered meaningless, she turns to childhood friends for support, gets a job, and becomes involved with two very different men. But just as her future begins to emerge, her past throws up a daunting challenge.

Marian cut herself off from her wealthy, conservative Irish Catholic family when she volunteered during the Spanish Civil War - an experience she has always kept to herself. Now in her 90s, she shares her Rhode Island cottage with her granddaughter Amelia, a young woman of good heart but only a vague notion of life's purpose. Their daily existence is intertwined with Marian's secret past: the blow to her youthful idealism when she witnessed the brutalities on both sides of Franco's war.

In these absorbing and exquisitely made novellas of relationships at home and abroad, both historical and contemporary, we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her final days as a transplant to New York City; a vulnerable American grad student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title novella, who gets more out of life than most of us; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high-school kid in America.

On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her 20-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself?

Miranda and Adam are masterfully portrayed characters, intent upon understanding who they are in relation to who they were. A story about what first love means and how it is shattered, and the lessons old lovers may still have to share with each other many years later, The Love of My Youth is also a poignant look back at the hopes and dreams of a generation and what became of them.

Hailed “the deepest and the best” of a Pulitzer-Prize winning author's novels, a business man struggles to restore his faith after his son is killed (New York Times Book Review). In 1960s New York, Edward Ives is a picture of the American dream. Adopted as a child by a widowed print shop...

Sky-Hitching to Heaven, Experiencing the Fun Side of God is an entertaining book that includes thirty amazing experiences in which God intervened in unexpected ways. Mary Gordon has lived a life filled with thrills. Whether “sky-hitching” across the country, whitewater canoeing, hiking, primitive camping, or cooking exotic multi-course meals, she sees God involved in the everyday and the extraordinary aspects of life. There’s even a chapter involving a shopping miracle. In 1977 Mary sky-hitched from mid-Ohio to Spokane, Washington.

Inspired Moments of Truth, A Book of Poetry is a collection of poems inspired and written during times of prayer. This diversified selection includes eloquence, cleverness, rhythmic expositions of Scriptural passages, thought-provoking lines, humor, and even silly limericks.