Enjoying her life as a Kentucky bluegrass fiddler, Molly Snow is shattered when her five-year-old daughter dies in a senseless accident and finds help from two comforting older women. Reprint.

Come and Go, Molly Snow

Taylor-Hall, Mary Ann

Literature & Fiction

Avon/Books

In a novel as sad and sweet as a bluegrass fiddler's song, Carrie Mullins falls for a heartbreaking man, loses her daughter, and learns the healing power of music and daily routine from two caring, older women.

Come and Go, Molly Snow: A Novel

United States

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

"Soon or a little too lateeverything you never knewyou always wanted turns uphereat The Breakers"―from the book In her new novel At The Breakers, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, author of the widely praised and beloved Come and Go, Molly Snow, presents Jo Sinclair, a longtime single mother of four children. Fleeing an abusive relationship after a shocking attack, Jo finds herself in Sea Cove, New Jersey, in front of The Breakers, a salty old hotel in the process of renovation. Impulsively, she negotiates a job painting the guest rooms and settles in with her youngest child, thirteen-year-old Nick. As each room is transformed under brush and roller, Jo finds a way to renovate herself, reclaiming a promising life derailed by pregnancy and a forced marriage at age fourteen. Jo's new life at the hotel features a memorable mix of locals and guests, among them Iris Zephyr, the hotel's ninety-two-year-old permanent boarder; Charlie, a noble mixed-breed dog; Marco, owner of a nearby gas station/liquor store, who may become Jo's next mistake; and enigmatic Wendy, her streetwise eighteen-year-old daughter, who signs on as housekeeper. Irrepressible Victor Mangold, Jo's former professor and a well-known poet some twenty years her senior, invites himself to Thanksgiving dinner and into her life, his passion awakening Jo's yearning for art and love. At The Breakers is a deeply felt and beautifully written novel about forgiveness and reconciliation. In Jo's words, she is "trying to find the right way to live" as a long-suffering woman who is put through the fire and emerges with a chance at a full, rich life for herself and her children, if only she has the faith to take it.

At The Breakers: A Novel (Kentucky Voices)

University Press of Kentucky

Literary

Mary Ann Taylor-Hall's highly acclaimed first novel, Come and Go, Molly Snow, introduces us to Carrie Marie Mullins, a gifted Kentucky bluegrass fiddler and singer in the Hawktown Road band. After moving to Lexington to develop her talents, Carrie becomes infatuated with the band's leader, Cap Dunlap. Her romantic distraction prevents Carrie from saving her five-year-old daughter, Molly, when she careens down the driveway and is killed by a truck. Overwhelmed with grief, Carrie breaks down. Cap finds Carrie in this state of distress and takes her to Ona and Ruth Barkley, two elderly sisters living in an old farmhouse. It is on the sisters' farm that Carrie is able to slowly come to terms with her heartache and guilt over Molly's death. As she picks up the pieces of her shattered life, Carrie draws on the two women's friendship, her inner strength, and finally, the healing power of music.

Come and Go, Molly Snow: A Novel (Kentucky Voices)

Contemporary

Poetry. OUT OF NOWHERE is the first comprehensive collection of poetry by Kentucky writer Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, presenting sixty-six new poems and work from two previous letterpress collections. Selected and arranged by the author, the poems in OUT OF NOWHERE unfold as a luminous narrative of the poet's life, moving through seasons of experience—from the first stirrings of childhood consciousness to present-day meditations on loss and grief—with candor, clarity, and startling tenderness. She opens to the reader the intimate landscape of her life in rural Kentucky, which she connects directly to the immensities and astonishing mysteries of the universe that come smashing through even our most ordinary days. "The subject here is daily life and its uncommon richness.... The starkly resonant moment discovered in these poems suddenly appears to be at one with common sense and practicality, grounded in the here and now. And yet the poems in this deep and enlarging book always defy that superficial description—because that is what this book is about, a sweet, abiding defiance. All things refuse to be merely what they seem at first notice; all things have an after life, an inner-life, a beyond-life. Beauty, at first, is no big deal, and is then accepted; spiritual and temporal transcendence are no large claims on this reality. And yet, love in its various forms comes along, to move the poet and the entire world around her from happiness through grief, and on to further love and further wisdom. This is a book of gorgeous poetry that reaches always beyond itself, and leaves one with the feeling that always reaching farther is what we are supposed to do. And so, along with great beauty and true art, in this book we also have an invitation."—Maurice Manning "I never get tired of being inside the mind of Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, never knowing what will turn up next in this poet's keen and tender seeing of the world—creature or spirit, a kind of radiance suffusing everything. Each of these poems is so alive, so unexpected, so uncontrived, so beautiful and true in the rarest, most startling way. I could dwell here forever."—Cecelia Woloch "Mary Ann Taylor-Hall is a lyrical cosmonaut, an explorer into the mystery of time, space and consciousness. Who are we and what is all this that comes out of nowhere? Beholding this mystery with sheer wonder, she zigzags between the out–there and the right-here. These poems form a breathtaking, exhilarating narrative, a journey through a particular life in the context of the infinite. She can touch base with the universe and then zoom in on a bird feather or a yellow leaf. We are jolted by her perceptions, surprised by what we hadn't noticed, but she was up at dawn, noticing—noticing everything, in detail, and bringing the fresh news to us. OUT OF NOWHERE is nothing less than genius."—Bobbie Ann Mason

Out of Nowhere: New and Selected Poems

Poetry

Old Cove Press

<div>Five novelistic short stories by the acclaimed author ofCome and Go, Molly Snow.</div>

How She Knows What She Knows About Yo-Yos: Stories

Sarabande Books

In these five luxuriant short stories, the acclaimed author of Come and Go, Molly Snow searches out the complex truth of critical moments in the lives of five women.
The central figures in these stories range in age from a young single ESL teacher in "Todo el Mundo"-Leila, bent on resisting the advances of a fast party set of middle-aged mainland married couples in Puerto Rico-to Rosa of "Banana Boats," a Chicago Czech overheard in the midst of her reflections on a longtime marriage to a vain man of genteel Southern airs and irremediable fakery.
Like the human predicaments delineated in them, the settings of the five stories are memorably rendered. In the title story, Undella defies Baptist opinion in Ellenberg, Kentucky, when she takes up with a yo-yo salesman, an archetypal trickster who both snares and liberates her. In "The World's Room," trekking to a prehistoric hill-fort and along the stony beach of southern England in winter, Gin, a vulnerable young American poet, puzzles her way through two romantic involvements to accept the reality of her own history. Taylor-Hall devotes herself not only to satisfying the reader's hunger for story-for just the right action, gesture, event, saying-but also to the reader's pleasure in interior moments, in idiosyncratic monologue and unforgettable voices.
In portraying women of intelligence and moxie, Taylor-Hall's authorial wit is almost always perched close upon the verge of hilarity. With a wonderfully keen eye and a shrewd ear, Taylor-Hall addresses the strait gate of women's choices, giving a wise, sorrowful, and deeply funny cost-benefit analysis of erotic experience and attachments.
Mary Ann Taylor Hall's short fiction has appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Colorado Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Florida Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and Ploughshares. It has won a PEN/Syndicated Fiction Award and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council. Her first novel, Come and Go, Molly Snow, was published in February 1995. Hall lives on a farm on the county line between Harrison and Scott C

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

Books by Taylor-Hall, Mary Ann

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

Come and Go, Molly Snow

Come and Go, Molly Snow: A Novel

At The Breakers: A Novel (Kentucky Voices)

At The Breakers: A Novel (Kentucky Voices)

Come and Go, Molly Snow: A Novel (Kentucky Voices)

Out of Nowhere: New and Selected Poems

How She Knows What She Knows About Yo-Yos: Stories

How She Knows What She Knows About Yo-Yos: Stories