Fellow artists Romy March and Augustine Marks migrate from place to place, separately and together, united by their constant love for each other, in a story that moves from the Italian Renaissance and the life of Romy's ancestor to the early twentieth century. 100,000 first printing. $75,000 ad/promo. Tour.

The Passion Dream Book: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

OTTO, WHITNEY

United States

Harpercollins

The Passion Dream Book travels from the Italian Renaissance, when a girl spends her days spying on a famous young artist and experiences the divided love of wanting the artist and wanting to be the artist. Progressing to the early years of the 20th century, the novel follows the experiences of two artists, Romy March, a descendent of the Renaissance girl, and Augustine Marks. 
 Otto's novel is an imaginative mix of fact and fiction, history and story about the two enduring, occasionally conflicting passions of love and work. As Romy March and Augustine Marks migrate from place to place, separately and together, their love is their home and their home is each other. 
 The outsider lives they lead provide them with various living situations, including silent-era Hollywood, the Harlem Renaissance, Paris in the late 1920s and back to America. The novel touches on the migratory habits of artist colonies (and why they don't last), on race (since Romy and Augustine are of different races) and how one lives when tradition does not hold.

Passion Dream Book, The

Literary

HarpPeren

An extraordinay and moving reading experience, HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT is an exploration of women of yesterday and today, who join together in a uniquely female experience. As they gather year after year, their stories, their wisdom, their lives, form the pattern from which all of us draw warmth and comfort for ourselves.

HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT.

Contemporary

Villard Books

"Intensely thoughtful...honest...intelligent....The book spans half a century and addresses not only (these women's) histories but also their children's, their lovers', their country's, and, in the process, their gender's." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Eight women gather together over the years to piece together an extrarodinary quilt of their own imaginative devising. And as they stitch, we listen to the stories they have to tell of their successes and failures, their lives and loves, their dreams, desires, and the surprise and sometimes joy of living. A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE COMING OUT FALL 1995 -- with Winona Ryder, Maya Angelou, and Rip Torn

How to Make an American Quilt

Ballantine Books

Now You See Her

"Graceful...Poetic...Otto's voice is sympathetic and direct, her imagination equally practical and romantic." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "ENCHANTING...ASTONISHING AND LOVELY." --Entertainment Weekly Kiki Shaw, a game show question writer, is about to turn forty. She doesn't mind that, except that she's also disappearing. Parts of her that were always there are vanishing, and no one seems to notice. As she contemplates this experience, Kiki makes certain discoveries about her life and those of the women closest to her. Perhaps they will all evanesce bit by bit, until they detect where they misplaced themselves and their once-promising lives (. As she did in her New York Times bestseller, How to Make an American Quilt, Whitney Otto has created a rich gallery of voices and lives that draws us in and pierces our perceptions of who we are or should be. "The sight of a work and talent in progress is welcome in the House of Fiction." --The New York Times "You are in the hands of a master. Now sit back and enjoy it." --The Hartford Courant "[This] gradually, even magically, unfolds to yield another of Otto's intricate, intimate tapestries." --Publishers Weekly

“Remarkable . . . It is a tribute to an art form that allowed women self-expression even when society did not. Above all, though, it is an affirmation of the strength and power of individual lives, and the way they cannot help fitting together.”—The New York Times Book Review An extraordinary and moving novel, How to Make an American Quilt is an exploration of women of yesterday and today, who join together in a uniquely female experience. As they gather year after year, their stories, their wisdom, their lives, form the pattern from which all of us draw warmth and comfort for ourselves. The inspiration for the major motion picture featuring Winona Ryder, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, and Maya Angelou Praise for How to Make an American Quilt “Fascinating . . . highly original . . . These are beautiful individual stories, stitched into a profoundly moving whole. . . . A spectrum of women’s experience in the twentieth century.”—Los Angeles Times “Intensely thoughtful . . . In Grasse, a small town outside Bakersfield, the women meet weekly for a quilting circle, piercing together scraps of their husbands’ old workshirts, children’s ragged blankets, and kitchen curtains. . . . Like the richly colored, well-placed shreds that make up the substance of an American quilt, details serve to expand and illuminate these characters. . . . The book spans half a century and addresses not only [these women’s] histories but also their children’s, their lovers’, their country’s, and in the process, their gender’s.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A radiant work of art . . . It is about mothers and daughters; it is about the estrangement and intimacy between generations. . . . A compelling tale.”—The Seattle Times

How to Make an American Quilt: A Novel

Random House Publishing Group

The bestselling author of How to Make an American Quilt transports us to San Francisco in the early 1980s, a magical, fog-shrouded city suffused—as are many of its denizens—with possibility and restless energy. In A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity, Whitney Otto’s charac-ters congregate night after night at a North Beach bar called the Youki Singe Tea Room, their lives conjoined by the bonds of friendship and shared experience. At the Youki Singe, the stories of these young people’s lives—their parties, their eccentric living situations, their passions for books and art and one another—are recorded in one patron’s “pillow book,” her version of the intimate journals of the courtesans of Edo Japan. Meanwhile, though, the careless joys of the drifting life are giving way to a desire to find something more substantial, a need to belong to something or someone. The title A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity is taken from a series of woodblock prints by the eighteenth-century artist Utamaro, a master at depicting Japan’s legendary Floating World, where, it is said, the patrons of the great pleasure quarters—and their escorts—devoted them-selves to the pursuit of music, sex, food, poetry, theater, and fashion. Now, two hundred years later and an ocean away, the young men and women of Otto’s San Francisco find themselves in their own version of a Floating World. Illustrated with more than two dozen beautifully reproduced woodblock prints, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity conjures an atmosphere both dreamy and contemporary. Whitney Otto engages the senses as well as the mind while exploring the intricacies, the trouble, and the rapture of human connection.

A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity: A Novel

Random House]

"Remarkable...An affirmation of the strength and power of individual lives, and the way they cannot help fitting together." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW An extraordinay and moving reading experience, HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT is an exploration of women of yesterday and today, who join together in a uniquely female experience. As they gather year after year, their stories, their wisdom, their lives, form the pattern from which all of us draw warmth and comfort for ourselves. A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE COMING OUT FALL 1995 -- with Maya Angelou, Winona Ryder, and Rip Torn From the Trade Paperback edition.

Villard

Inventive and haunting, How to Make an American Quilt powerfully captures the rites of passage in women's lives. The art of quiltmaking becomes a metaphor for the realities of being a woman in America as the unforgettable stories of seven members of a contemporary California quilting group unfold. And as we come to understand the beauty and complexity of the quilting process -- to see its evolution in our country's history -- we come to intimately know the history of these women as well.

Random House Audio |

"Graceful...Poetic...Otto's voice is sympathetic and direct, her imagination equally practical and romantic." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "ENCHANTING...ASTONISHING AND LOVELY." --Entertainment Weekly Kiki Shaw, a game show question writer, is about to turn forty. She doesn't mind that, except that she's also disappearing. Parts of her that were always there are vanishing, and no one seems to notice. As she contemplates this experience, Kiki makes certain discoveries about her life and those of the women closest to her. Perhaps they will all evanesce bit by bit, until they detect where they misplaced themselves and their once-promising lives (. As she did in her New York Times bestseller, How to Make an American Quilt, Whitney Otto has created a rich gallery of voices and lives that draws us in and pierces our perceptions of who we are or should be. "The sight of a work and talent in progress is welcome in the House of Fiction." --The New York Times "You are in the hands of a master. Now sit back and enjoy it." --The Hartford Courant "[This] gradually, even magically, unfolds to yield another of Otto's intricate, intimate tapestries." --Publishers Weekly From the Trade Paperback edition.

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

Books by OTTO, WHITNEY

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

The Passion Dream Book: A Novel

Passion Dream Book, The

HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT.

How to Make an American Quilt

Now You See Her

How to Make an American Quilt: A Novel

A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity: A Novel

How to Make an American Quilt

How to Make an American Quilt

Now You See Her