Hortense Calisher: 19 books

Hortense Calisher’s evocative memoir bristles with intelligence and youthful inquiry Kissing Cousins recalls the author as a teenager: peppy, earnest, and a bit self-important. Hortense Calisher documents her family’s surprising history as Southern Jews adrift in New York. Finding her new...

Finalist for the National Book Award: Thirty-six stories by O. Henry Award–winning novelist Hortense Calisher The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher gathers short pieces that chart the author’s best-loved themes of mindful consciousness and social worlds. This collection includes one...

Hortense Calisher delivers another collection of provocative prose, on par with that of Henry James and John Updike A novella plus twelve short vignettes, Tale for the Mirror demonstrates Hortense Calisher’s masterful use of language in an exploration of the human condition. In the title...

The recognition of failure and success is the theme of these eight short stories and the title novella from three-time National Book Award finalist Hortense Calisher Extreme Magic is Hortense Calisher’s third collection of shorter works, after In the Absence of Angels (1951) and Tale for...

The debut short story collection that launched the career of one of the twentieth century’s most vivid writers, featuring the celebrated tale “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks” In this captivating collection of fifteen short stories, many of which first appeared in the New...

A National Book Award nominee: Hortense Calisher’s autobiography captures the making of a distinct literary voice Although Hortense Calisher’s fiction often draws on autobiographical elements, Herself is a disciplined documentation of the award-winning author’s life and work. She surveys...

Hortense Calisher’s complex exploration of the journey of a young man whose intelligent observations cannot help him figure out his own direction Returning home to New York from Europe on his twenty-first birthday, draft-dodging narrator Bunty Bronstein is frustrated with his increasingly...

A study in motives, conflicts, ambitions, and fears as idealistic young newlyweds face unanticipated realities Hortense Calisher’s second novel is a multigenerational story of art, family, and marriage. Opening with Liz and David’s wedding and chronicling the first four years of their life...

A sprawling, multicharacter masterpiece of guilt and the hope for redemption Opening in 1943 and spanning over a decade, The New Yorkers is Hortense Calisher’s most ambitious novel. Judge Simon Mannix, a well-educated upper-middle-class New Yorker, is faced with a terrible decision when his...

Two novellas from award-winning author Hortense Calisher offering very different journeys: the first looking hopefully forward, and the second, into a painful past The characters in these two novellas take introspective, poignant excursions both to where they want to be (The Railway Police)...

In the vein of Eudora Welty and Charles Dickens, Hortense Calisher’s astounding first novel examines a young man’s detachment from the world—and his struggle to rejoin it Pierre Goodman enjoys an idyllic childhood as the son of a widowed dressmaker in post–World War I England. But paradise...

Hortense Calisher’s excursion into science fiction: A rich portrait of the passengers aboard the first civilian space shuttle The Citizen Courier is headed toward Island US, “the first public habitat in space.” Aboard the ship resides a collection of diverse travelers. Narrator Tom Gilpin...

A complex masterpiece that reveals the mind of a contemporary woman beyond the confines of family, love, and duty to one’s self Lexie, a married woman with four children, undergoes a midlife crisis and questions her role as wife, mother, and lover. From within a Victorian house in the Hudson...

A cheeky portrait of an old-fashioned young woman’s assimilation into the modern world Set in 1960s New York, this piquant coming-of-age story concerns a teenage girl, Queenie, raised to become a “kept woman” in an exceedingly comfortable and well-adjusted—yet insular and retrograde—household....