Hortense Calisher: 19 books

Hortense Calisher’s revelatory novel of celebrity, small-town values, and a young woman’s coming of age Famous playwright Craig Towle has decided to return to his New Jersey hometown, a suburb of New York City. He arrives with his world-renowned reputation and a new wife who is half his...

A unique novel of parents and children—and the spaces between them Dr. Niels Berners—a Swiss plastic surgeon living in New York—is struggling to recover from his dysfunctional son’s abandonment of him. He joins a group of four other parents, all with absent children either in jail or...

A finely observed and lovingly detailed portrait of a woman attempting to find a community and understand her own troubled history After spending two decades in jails, psych wards, and halfway houses for her peripheral involvement in a radical students’ bombing plot, thirty-six-year-old Carol...

A humorous satire and loving tribute to science fiction that delves into the tenuous relationship between science and the humanities by asking, What does it mean to be human? A genderless alien from Ellipsia, a planet whose inhabitants have no concept of individuality, comes to Earth on an...

A novel that examines aging and marriage with sincerity and insight Rupert and Gemma, an elderly couple still very much in love, know that death will inevitably come for one of them before taking the other, so they keep private journals to ensure that the survivor’s mate will never truly...