Mary Gordon: 42 books

The stories of Mary Gordon return us to the pleasure of this writer's craft and to her monumental talent as an observer of character and of the ever-fading American Dream. These pieces encompass the pre- and postwar Irish American family life she circles in the early Temporary Shelter series, as well...

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...

Mary Gordon, bestselling author of Spending and The Shadow Man, investigates the role that place plays in the formation of identity -- the connections between how we experience place and how we become ourselves. From her grandmother's house, which stood at the center of her childhood life, to a rented...

Roots of empathy—an evidence-based program developed in 1996 by longtime educator and social entrepreneur Mary Gordon—has already reached more than 270,000 children in Canada, the U.S., Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. Now, as The New York Times reports that “empathy lessons are...

From the best-selling novelist and memoirist: a deeply personal view of her discovery of the celebrated modern monk and thinker through his writings. “If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we...

Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. A hard-working single mother – Mary Gordon's father died when she was still a girl – she managed to hold down a job, dress smartly, raise her daughter...

A book of profound and candid stories by one of America’s best novelists Temporary Shelter is a collection of twenty expertly crafted short stories by Mary Gordon. The characters here are of diverse ages, classes, and nationalities, yet all are alike in their desperate need of safe harbor....

Where do you live? The answer to this seemingly simple question can be more complicated than you'd think.Drawing on personal experience, Mary Gordon examines various forms of abode-from her childhood house in Far Rockaway to apartments in Palo Alto, Rome, and the Upper West Side-as well as the very concept...

"A master of the story form" (The New York Times) offers a fresh, revealing portrait of the legendary saint Celebrated novelist Mary Gordon brings Joan of Arc alive as a complex figure full of contradictions and desires, as well as spiritual devotion. A humble peasant girl, Joan transformed...

The award-winning author at her storytelling best: four compelling novellas of Americans in Europe and Europeans in America. 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...

On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-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...

Reading Jesus is a personal journey through the fundamental Biblical stories. As celebrated author Mary Gordon ponders the intense strangeness of a deity in human form, unresolved moral ambiguities within the text, and the problem posed to her as an enlightened reader by the miracle of the Resurrection....

Mary Gordon’s extraordinary novel about a young Catholic woman who pursues father figures—only to wrestle to break free of them Felicitas Maria Taylor was brought up in a cocoon, raised by five devoutly religious women. The death of her father while she was still a baby has caused her to...

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Original Selection   Brave, intelligent, fierce—eighteen-year-old Silvia knows how to handle men. When she discovered that her Salsa-dancing father’s been hiding an affair, she threw him out of the apartment she shared with her mother and changed the locks....