In Tourist Season, award-winning author Enid Shomer offers ten brilliant, richly detailed unforgettable stories of resilient women, aged seventeen to seventy, each at a pivotal point in her life. Their journeys cross distances of place and mind: A middle-aged Floridian who learns that she is the reincarnation of a Buddhist saint takes daring steps on her path to enlightenment; a long-buried secret forces one woman to leave the daughter she deeply loves; a Radcliffe student faces shocking family truths and taboos during the summer of 1966; an unexpected kinship forms between two women who land in a county jail after an excursion to Las Vegas. These travelers wander through shifting emotional landscapes of love, sex, and relationships, and often miss the destinations they’d wished to reach–of insight, connection, and understanding. Whether journeying to new geographical locales or exploring uncharted personal terrain, Tourist Season offers a provocative, engaging, and often humorous road map of the heart and soul. “[When reading Enid Shomer’s stories,] the thing one quickly senses is the will and the voice, someone saying, in effect, ‘Relax, be comfortable, I’m going to take good care of you.’ These are very fine stories.” –James Salter, in Imaginary Men “Beautifully made, surprising and inevitable, wonderfully inventive and deeply true, these stories are full of small, irreverent, straight-faced miracles. They will lead women of all ages to suspect that the best may be yet to come.” ––Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness and Sight Hound

Tourist Season: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Shomer, Enid

United States

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Before she became the nineteenth century's heroine, before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert traveled up the Nile at the same time. In reality, they never met. But in The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, they ignite a friendship marked by intelligence, humor, and a ravishing tenderness that will alter both their destinies. On the surface, Nightingale and Flaubert have little in common. She is a woman with radical ideas about society and God, naive in the ways of men. He is a notorious womanizer, involved with innumerable prostitutes. But both are at painful crossroads in their lives and burn with unfulfilled ambition. In Shomer's deft hands, the two unlikely soulmates come together to share their darkest torments and fervent hopes. Brimming with adventure and the sparkling sensibilities of the two travelers, this mesmerizing debut novel offers a luminous combination of gorgeous prose and wild imagination, all of it colored by the opulent tapestry of mid-nineteenth century Egypt.

Twelve Rooms of the Nile

Simon&Schuster

In Shoreless, her fifth collection of poetry, Enid Shomer continues to explore her passionate relationship with the Florida landscape, the inextricable web of family, and the challenges of the body. While studded with the austere recognitions of growing older, these poems are punctuated by humor and play?formally elegant and inventive, beautifully textured and nuanced. Throughout the book, Shomer employs the? language of science and Eros to uncover the exquisite truths of pain and pleasure.

Shoreless

Poetry

Persea

The startle effect: Poems (Herland)

American Studies Press

A captivating debut that imagines a passionate friendship between Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert, when they were young and exploring the Nile in 1850. Before she became the nineteenth century’s greatest heroine, before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert traveled down the Nile at the same time. In the imaginative leap taken by award-winning writer Enid Shomer’s The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, the two ignite a passionate friendship marked by intelligence, humor, and a ravishing tenderness that will alter both their destinies. In 1850, Florence, daughter of a prominent English family, sets sail on the Nile chaperoned by longtime family friends and her maid, Trout. To her family’s chagrin—and in spite of her wealth, charm, and beauty—she is, at twenty-nine and of her own volition, well on her way to spinsterhood. Meanwhile, Gustave and his good friend Maxime Du Camp embark on an expedition to document the then largely unexplored monuments of ancient Egypt. Traumatized by the deaths of his father and sister, and plagued by mysterious seizures, Flaubert has dropped out of law school and writ-ten his first novel, an effort promptly deemed unpublishable by his closest friends. At twenty-eight, he is an unproven writer with a failing body. Florence is a woman with radical ideas about society and God, naive in the ways of men. Gustave is a notorious womanizer and patron of innumerable prostitutes. But both burn with unfulfilled ambition, and in the deft hands of Shomer, whose writing The New York Times Book Review has praised as “beautifully cadenced, and surprising in its imaginative reach,” the unlikely soul mates come together to share their darkest torments and most fervent hopes. Brimming with adventure and the sparkling sensibilities of the two travelers, this mesmerizing novel offers a luminous combination of gorgeous prose and wild imagination, all of it colored by the opulent tapestry of mid-nineteenth-century Egypt.

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

This “mesmerizing new work of historical fiction”(The Miami Herald) imagines the deep friendship of Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert as they travel up the Nile. Before she became the nineteenth century’s greatest heroine, before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert traveled down the Nile at the same time in 1850. But where history would have these two figures float right by each other, the award-winning writer Enid Shomer brings them together to ignite a passionate friendship that alters both their destinies. Shomer, whose writing The New York Times has praised as “beautifully cadenced, and surprising in its imaginative reach,” brings to life the opulent tapestry of mid-nineteenth-century Egypt as the unlikely soul mates come together to share their darkest torments and most fervent hopes.

While Jacqueline Cochran was alive, no man or woman in the world could match her records for speed, distance, and altitude flying. Founder and director of the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II, Cochran continued to fly competitively until she was sixty, owned and operated her own line of designer cosmetics for three decades, ran for Congress, and generally placed herself on the path of history. Having begun life as a foundling in the crushing poverty of a lumber company town of the Florida panhandle, she described her life as "a passage from sawdust to stardust." Yet after her death she has barely been remembered. Poet Enid Shomer brings back this mercurial, dazzling, powerful woman. These poems speak in her voice and in the voices of her mother, teachers, husband, confidants, and political opponents, shaped by Shomer's consummate formal control and stunning lyricism. Illustrated with photographs.

Stars at Noon: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

University of Arkansas Press

Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3 collects three chapbooks in a single volume: brothers Anders and Kai Carlson-Wee’s Northern Corn invites us on a trip across an America of dust, trains, poverty, dignity, and dreams; Begotten, co-written by Cave Canem fellows F. Douglas Brown and Geffrey Davis, bravely and tenderly explores fatherhood in the era of Black Lives Matter; and Enid Shomer’s Driving through the Animal lovingly moves between unflinching witness of destruction and hope for the future. It’s the third volume in the Floodgate Poetry Series, edited by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum. Chapbooks—short books under 40 pages—arose when printed books became affordable in the 16th century. The series is in the tradition of 18th and 19th century British and American literary annuals, and the Penguin Modern Poets Series of the 1960s and ’70s.

Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3: Three Chapbooks in a Single Volume

Davis, Geffrey

Carlson-Wee, Anders

Carlson-Wee, Kai

Brown, F. Douglas

Upper Rubber Boot Books

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

Books by Shomer, Enid

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

Tourist Season: Stories

Twelve Rooms of the Nile

Shoreless

The startle effect: Poems (Herland)

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

Stars at Noon: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran

Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3: Three Chapbooks in a Single Volume