Merrill Joan Gerber: 17 books

"Every woman gets a call like this sooner or later. The phone rings, a man says: 'This is a voice from your past.'" The opening of the compelling title story of Merrill Joan Gerber's collection sets the tone for each of the thirteen remarkable pieces therein, two of them previously unpublished. Set mostly...

Winner of the Ribalow Prize from Hadassah Magazine, Merrill Joan Gerber superbly evokes an anguished child's faltering steps toward consciousness... Gerber has written often-and grippingly-of tormented families… but never as daringly as here."In this brutally candid, semiautobiographical novel, Gerber...

"Once her dying got underway, Anna could not really complain about the way the process moved along." So begins this deftly amusing, wryly perceptive look at the dying of a feisty, funny ninety-year old woman. During the four days between her death and her burial --and with the unique perception she is...

Anna in Chains is a collection of stories about the reality of being an elderly woman in the modern world and all the struggles that go with it. Anna Goldman, nearly eighty years old, widowed and living on her own in the Fairfax Area of Los Angeles, struggles to remain independent as she moves through...

This shattering novel about wife and child abuse is a work of art that haunts the reader's memory. Merrill Joan Gerber reveals the love affair of Ginny and her sensitive but horribly destructive lover, Michael. The pair adopts a child that Michael both loves and abuses.

Merrill Joan Gerber holds the record of having sold more short stories to Redbook Magazine than any other writer. This selection of twenty-five linked tales, published in Redbook from 1964 to 1991, chronicles the passionate (domestic) adventures of Janet, Danny and their three daughters.

Old Mother, Little Cat is a highly readable memoir of Gerber’s mother’s decline in health and how their relationship grew during this time, blended in with Gerber’s finding a kitten and her developing relationship with Max (the name she gives the kitten).

Gerber heads to Florence with her husband, a history professor taking a group of students. She goes in nervous, not knowing any Italian, but gradually starts to learn her way around Florence and other cities in Italy.

This exceptional book of short stories, chosen for inclusion in the prestigious Illinois Short Fiction Series, contains Gerber's powerful tale "I Don't Believe This," which won an O. Henry Award.

Fifteen stories previously published in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Redbook, and The Sewanee Review, Gerber's work discovers her roots in a background predominantly Jewish. Her female look at daily lives is a nice placement alongside a Philip Roth.

Spanning the continent from Brooklyn and Miami to Pasadena and Berkeley, these stories and the characters who people them are as real as our own lives, and the reader is drawn into the essence of life in all its complexity and wonder.

In this powerful love story that takes place on a Turkish sailing vessel, Lily, a professor at a Florida college, finds herself required to be the companion of her newly widowed mother as they take a cruise along the Turkish coastline on a small sailing ketch. Expecting to endure, though not enjoy, this...

Now Molly Knows is a novel about a girl's sexual discovery, from early teens and high school through college and on up into marriage. It's set in the American fifties.

"It's truly powerful, and acrid, and barbed, and filled with wonderful, and unexpected, turns of phrase and above all it's shocking in its directness and understated anger and sadness and fear… it's an amazing piece of writing."-Cynthia OzickImagine being told before the age of forty that...