Alison Lurie: 13 books

The author of The War Between the Tates and the Pulitzer prize-winning Foreign Affairs now brings her irresistible wit to the ghost story.   In nine spooky tales, Alison Lurie writes of women haunted by ghosts both literal and metaphorical: A woman about to marry Mr. Right is visited by the spirit...

How do the spaces we inhabit affect us—and reflect us? A Pulitzer Prize–winning author explores architecture, in this insightful, “breezy” read (The Washington Post). In 1981, Alison Lurie published The Language of Clothes, a meditation on costume and fashion as an expression of history,...

Are some of the world's most talented children's book authors essentially children themselves? In this engaging series of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Lurie considers this theory, exploring children's classics from many eras and relating them to the authors who wrote them, including...

Over the years, Alison Lurie has earned a devoted readership for her satiric wit and storytelling acumen. With Truth and Consequences, described by the New Yorker as "a comedy of adultery with a comedy of academia thrown in," Lurie returns with a modern social satire that recalls the best...

A husband’s affair pushes a suburban wife to her breaking point in this “near perfect comedy of manners” by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Real People (The New York Times). Erica Tate wouldn’t mind getting up in the morning if her children were less intolerable. Until puberty...

**Two sociologists infiltrate a cult that pulls them into madness in this “**barbed and richly entertaining” novel from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author (The Wall Street Journal).   Once the nation’s most popular sociologist, Tom McMann searches for a research subject that will invigorate...

This Pulitzer Prize–winning novel follows two American academics in London—a young man and a middle-aged woman—as they each fall into unexpected romances. In her early fifties, Vinnie Miner is the sort of woman no one ever notices, despite her career as an Ivy League professor. She doubts...

In the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s “excellent” debut, a professor’s wife searches for liberation at the hands of a music instructor (The New York Times). Though born in New York, the men of Emmy Turner’s family have long found their spiritual home in the idyllic Convers College....

A Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s “sparkling, smart” tale of an aging writer and his younger wife looking for new life—or a way to end it—in Key West (The New York Times). Every schoolboy in America knows the work of author Wilkie Walker, who won fame and fortune with his accessible...

In this “excellent” novel of “rare understanding” from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, culture shock consumes a young Harvard couple in Los Angeles (The New York Times). When his mentor at Harvard University suddenly leaves for Washington, Paul Cattleman finds himself adrift in the...

In this comedy by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a biographer out to vindicate a neglected female artist learns that the truth is never tidy. Polly Alter is through with men. Recovering from her divorce, she has taken a year off from her museum job to write a biography of Lorin Jones, a...

A novel of childlike wonder and adult discord during the Great Depression—by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Nowhere City.   Dozing in the back seat of her father’s car, Mary Ann Hubbard is the happiest eight-year-old in the country. It’s 1935, and she and her parents are going to...

An artists’ colony is a false paradise for a frustrated writer in this “witty, knowing, and perceptive” novel from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author (The New Yorker). The mansion is called Illyria, but for the writers and artists who flock there each summer, it’s a Garden of Eden where...