Traces the relation of literature to human life, in a collection of essays, such as the title piece that takes on Dreiser, Faulkner, and Updike, and others about abortion, male domination, and the Church

Good Boys and Dead Girls: And Other Essays

GORDON, Mary

Children's Books

Penguin??Books

“An elegant and moving generational saga . . . Satisfying and emotionally rich.”—People Both Ellen and Vincent left Ireland in the early part of this century, one bitterly escaping shame, humiliation, and fear; the other filled with hope for the promise and future of America—the “other side.” Together for more than sixty years, they raised a family, savored their dreams, comforted, challenged, and defied one another. Their desires and fears are manifested in the generations that follow—children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, each carrying as a legacy of the past, the need to find a true place in the family and in the world at large. As she writes of passage and change, of the struggle of generations to find a common ground, Mary Gordon reveals that the dramas wrought by social and cultural forces can be resolved only in the realm of the heart. “Epic in scope . . . The best of Mary Gordon’s fine books.” – The New York Times Book Review

The Other Side (Contemporary American Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

United States

A National Bestseller In these beautifully rendered novellas, the writer introduces three women, each of whom tells the story of the lover who most altered her life. In Immaculate Man he is a priest, a virgin at the age of forty-three. In Living at Home he is an Italian war correspondent who wants nothing but her body and the sanctuary of their house – until he is seized by news of another revolution. And in The Rest of Life, he is an intellectual teenager inspired by the Romantic poets to make a suicide pact. He is remembered six decades later by the woman with whom he made the pact. She decided to live. “Mary Gordon’s fiction is the work of a humane, masterly novelist . . . [whose] great gift is making us care about her people.” – Newsweek “Each of the three novellas gives us a woman’s love story . . . beautifully written and moving.” – The Boston Globe

The Rest of Life: Three Novellas (Contemporary American Fiction)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Penguin Group USA

"A master of the story form" (The New York Times) offers a fresh, revealing portrait of the legendary saint Celebrated novelist Mary Gordon brings Joan of Arc alive as a complex figure full of contradictions and desires, as well as spiritual devotion. A humble peasant girl, Joan transformed herself into the legendary Maid of Orléans, knight, martyr, and saint. Following the voice of God, she led an army to victory and crowned the king of France, only to be captured and burned at the stake as a heretic—all by the age of nineteen. Gordon does more than tell this gripping story—she explores Joan's mystery and the many facets of her inspiring life.

Joan of Arc: A Life (Penguin Lives)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Men and angels

Contemporary

JONATHAN CAPE.

Final Payments

When Isabel Moore's father dies, she finds herself, at the age of thirty, suddenly freed from eleven years of uninterrupted care for a helpless man. With all the patterns of her life suddenly rendered meaningless, she turns to childhood friends for support, gets a job, and becomes involved with two very different men. But just as her future begins to emerge, her past throws up a daunting challenge.  A moving story of self-reinvention, Final Payments is a timeless exploration of the nature of friendship, desire, guilt, and love.

Genre Fiction

Penguin Putnam~trade

Joan of Arc

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

When Isabel Moore's father dies, she finds herself, at the age of thirty, suddenly freed from eleven years of uninterrupted care for a helpless man. With all the patterns of her life suddenly rendered meaningless, she turns to childhood friends for support, gets a job, and becomes involved with two very different men. But just as her future begins to emerge, her past throws up a daunting challenge. A moving story of self-reinvention, Final Payments is a timeless exploration of the nature of friendship, desire, guilt, and love.

Anchor

Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. A hard-working single mother – Mary Gordon's father died when she was still a girl – she managed to hold down a job, dress smartly, raise her daughter on her own, and worship the beauty in life with a surprising joie de vivre. Bringing her exceptional talent for detail, character, and scene to bear on the life of her mother, Gordon gives us a deeply felt and powerfully moving book about their relationship. Toward the end of Anna's life, we watch the author care for her mother in old age, beginning to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.

Circling My Mother

Arts & Literature

Reading Jesus is a personal journey through the fundamental Biblical stories. As celebrated author Mary Gordon ponders the intense strangeness of a deity in human form, unresolved moral ambiguities within the text, and the problem posed to her as an enlightened reader by the miracle of the Resurrection. What she rediscovers—and reinterprets with her signature candor, intelligence, and straightforwardness—is a rich store of overlapping, sometimes conflicting teachings that feel both familiar and tantalizingly elusive.

Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels

History

World

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

Books by GORDON, Mary

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

Good Boys and Dead Girls: And Other Essays

The Other Side (Contemporary American Fiction)

The Rest of Life: Three Novellas (Contemporary American Fiction)

Joan of Arc: A Life (Penguin Lives)

Men and angels

Final Payments

Joan of Arc

Final Payments

Circling My Mother

Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels