Kinflicks

Returning home to Hullsport, Tennessee, to visit her dying mother, Ginny Babcock reviews the Kinflicks of her life--the home movies her mother used to make--from adolescence to middle-aged limbo, in an effort to discover herself. Read by Jo Beth Williams.

KINFLICKS

Literature & Fiction

Alther, Lisa

Contemporary

The New American Library

They call themselves "The Five" -- Sally and Emily Prince and Jed, Raymond, and Donny Tatro. Convinced they are special, they spend their Tennessee childhoods trading dreams in the branches of the Castle Tree. As children of the fifties, they are filled with wild ambitions and determined to live gaudy, glamorous lives. Lisa Alther's brilliant, broad-canvas story follows them from childhood to adulthood. The ties that bind them begin to dissolve when they become teenagers, yet the vibrant story continues -- and each member of The Five travels in a direction that he or she could have never anticipated. In this intelligent and heartbreaking novel, Alther brings to life not only the passions of her characters, but the fantasies and follies of an entire generation as well

Original Sins

Penguin Books, Ltd.

This is the story of mid-life crisis, and the search for a pastoral idyll, which becomes a sort of "Cold Comfort Farm" of the 1990s as Clea comes to know her new neighbours who include a lesbian teepee commune, some born-again fanatics and the ramshackle Marsh family.

Bedrock

Penguin Books Ltd; New Ed Edition

A provocative and wide-ranging conversation between two distinctive women—one American and one French—on the dilemmas, rewards, and demands of womanhood. Lisa Alther and Françoise Gilot have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Although from different backgrounds (Gilot from cosmopolitan Paris, Alther from small-town Tennessee) and different generations, they found they have a great deal in common as women who managed to support themselves with careers in the arts while simultaneously balancing the obligations of work and parenthood. About Women is their extended conversation in which they talk about everything important to them: their childhoods, the impact of war on their lives and their work, and their views on love, style, self-invention, feminism, and child rearing. They also discuss the creative impulse and the importance of art as they ponder what it means to be a woman.

About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter

GILOT, FRANÇOISE

Humor & Entertainment

Nan A. Talese

In her first novel, Alther traces the troubled, funny, heartbreaking coming of age of Ginny Babcock Bliss during the l950s and '60s. The daughter of one of the first families in Hullsport, Tennessee, Ginny bounces from one identity to another, adopting the values, politics, lifestyle, even sexual orientation of each new partner. In "Kinflicks," Alther reels through the ups and downs of Ginny's life by dividing her narrative into two sequences: Ginny herself narrates the adventures of her past while a third-person narrator takes over to describe her present, when she returns to Hullsport as an adult to care for her dying mother. Mary Cantwell, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called "Kinflicks" "an almost flawless balance of light and dark, the skittery and the sad." "Ginny is the classic outsider, " noted the Saturday Review in a rave review of the book, "and her fine sense of the comic permits the novel to approach a kind of high seriousness...A best-seller? Sure. In the august company of "The Catcher in the Rye," "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and Huck? Yes, indeed."

Kinflicks: A Novel

Galahad Books

Five children--two daughters of a mill-owner, two working-class brothers, and the Black son of the owner's maid--grow up and experience the wrenching changes of the sixties and seventies in America

KNOPF

At 35, Carolyn Kelly, nurse and lifelong member of the helping profession, finds herself in need of help and turns reluctantly--and defiantly--to psychotherapy and Hannah Burke to call up and confront the demons of her past

Other Women

Successful photographer and urbanite Clea Shawn searches for the serenity and sobriety to cope with a sterile marriage, grown children, and years of empty affairs, as well as an understanding of herself and her feelings, in the rural town of Roches Ridge, Vermont

History & Criticism

BERKLEY

Originally published by Penguin in 1976 and now reissued for the VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS series, the story of Ginny Babcock, a woman of the 1960s, flower child, cheerleader, dutiful daughter and wayward wife, which explores the limited roles offered to women in this period.  By the author of KINFLICKS, FIVE MINUTES IN HEAVEN and BEDROCK.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alther, Lisa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Alther, Lisa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alther, Lisa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

KINFLICKS

Original Sins

Bedrock

About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter

Kinflicks: A Novel

Original Sins

Other Women

Bedrock

Kinflicks

Kinflicks