Douglas Atwill: 7 books

Outsiders seldom understand the curious amalgam of artists, galleries, misfits and hangers-on known as the Santa Fe Art Scene. In this collection of stories, we witness a group of Santa Fe painters confronting their art and life in creative ways, solving the ages-old problems of painting the perfect...

Europe in the Cold War years was a dangerous place for Harold Bronson and his buddies, draftees commandeered into espionage and counterintelligence. Their low echelon escapades take them to Berlin, Ulm, the South of France, and Zurich. Bronson chooses this time of his life to explore a personal coming...

Neil Bronson, new from the Royal Academy, summers in Provence, teaching himself to paint outside. Before returning home, he and his friends, Sam and Carrie, rent a cottage on the coast, playing a langorous triangle of seaside sexual attraction. Neil’s uncle interrupts the idyll, urgently seeking...

An unexpected death in Donovan Merrill’s family makes it necessary that his grandmother, Anna, and he leave the rectory in San Miguel. They move into her summer cottage in the midst of the artist colony in the Laguna Beach of 1938, starting life over. It will be difficult with their diminished resources,...

A summer on the California coast calls to Mattox Williams, a writer wanting quiet days to do the finishing work on his novel. He leases his Santa Fe house for three months and finds an ocean-facing room at Glitter Bay. While meeting the other people of the beach community, a love affair develops as...

The title story tells of Marian Nakamura who pickles the fallen pears to remember a husband who took a fatal fall from an upper branch of a pear tree. The story won a place on the final ten list of a 2010 The New Yorker magazine competition. In another story a Minnesota woman learns to paint in Santa...

Graham Obermann is an established biographer of the Post-Impressionists. He is married to Celia Prosper, a modernist painter well-regarded by critics and collectors. As Obermann organizes a birthday party for Celia, looking after all the details, he descr