NATIONAL BESTSELLER “Engrossing...studded with wisdom about long-held bonds.” —People, Book of the Week “Enthralling, masterfully written...rich with social and psychological insights.” —The New York Times Book Review “A magnificent storytelling feat.” —The Boston Globe The “utterly engrossing, sweeping” (Time) story of a lifelong friendship between two very different “superbly depicted” (The Wall Street Journal) women with shared histories, divisive loyalties, hidden sorrows, and eighty years of summers on a pristine point of land on the coast of Maine, set across the arc of the 20th century. Celebrated children’s book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy—to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly. Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, a philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She strives to create beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons—but what is it that Polly wants herself? Agnes’s designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes’s resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all. “An ambitious and satisfying tale” (The Washington Post), Fellowship Point reads like a 19th-century epic, but it is entirely contemporary in its “reflections on aging, writing, stewardship, legacies, independence, and responsibility. At its heart, Fellowship Point is about caring for the places and people we love...This magnificent novel affirms that change and growth are possible at any age” (The Christian Science Monitor).

NATIONAL BESTSELLER “Engrossing...studded with wisdom about long-held bonds.” —People, Book of the Week “Enthralling, masterfully written...rich with social and psychological insights.” —The New York Times Book Review “A magnificent storytelling feat.” —The Boston Globe The “utterly engrossing, sweeping” (Time) story of a lifelong friendship between two very different “superbly depicted” (The Wall Street Journal) women with shared histories, divisive loyalties, hidden sorrows, and eighty years of summers on a pristine point of land on the coast of Maine, set across the arc of the 20th century. Celebrated children’s book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy—to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly. Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, a philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She strives to create beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons—but what is it that Polly wants herself? Agnes’s designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes’s resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all. “An ambitious and satisfying tale” (The Washington Post), Fellowship Point reads like a 19th-century epic, but it is entirely contemporary in its “reflections on aging, writing, stewardship, legacies, independence, and responsibility. At its heart, Fellowship Point is about caring for the places and people we love...This magnificent novel affirms that change and growth are possible at any age” (The Christian Science Monitor).

Into the Wild meets Walden—a lyrical memoir for nature lovers and for anyone who has wondered what it would be like to disconnect from our hyper-connected culture and seek more meaningful connections After losing vision in one eye and becoming estranged from his family and friends, a young man spent two years searching for identity in self-imposed solitude in the backwoods of northern Vermont, where he embarked on a project of stripping away facades and all social ties--and learned to face himself. On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod played a pick-up game of basketball. In a skirmish for a loose ball, a boy’s finger hooked behind Axelrod’s eyeball and left him permanently blinded in his right eye. A week later, he returned to the same dorm room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the distance between how people saw him and how he saw had widened into a gulf. Desperate for a sense of orientation he could trust, he retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a computer or television, and largely without human contact, for two years. He needed to find a more lasting sense of meaning away from society’s pressures and rush. Named one of the best books of the year by Slate, Chicago Tribune, Entropy Magazine, and named one of the top 10 memoirs by Library Journal

The masterful story of a lifelong friendship between two very different women with shared histories and buried secrets, tested in the twilight of their lives, set across the arc of the 20th century. Celebrated children's book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy--to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly. Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, and philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She exalts in creating beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons--but what is it that Polly wants herself? Agnes's designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes's resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all. Fellowship Point reads like a classic 19th-century novel in its beautifully woven, multilayered narrative, but it is entirely contemporary in the themes it explores; a deep and empathic interest in women's lives, the class differences that divided us, the struggle to protect the natural world, and, above all, a reckoning with intimacy, history, and posterity. It is a masterwork from Alice Elliott Dark.

N rural eastern Pennsylvania, nine-year-old Jane MacLeod is writing a book about the happy family she desperately wishes she had. Her mother, Via, is dissatisfied and petulant, always resentful of the time Jane's father, Emlin, a heart surgeon, must spend with his patients at the hospital. One night in 1964, the family (including Jane's two younger brothers and sister and Via's homosexual brother, Uncle Francis) gathers to watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. All goes well until Emlin discovers that someone has taken the phone off the hook, so that he can't receive emergency calls. Angrily, he accuses Via (who accuses Jane) and rushes off to the hospital. He is killed in an automobile accident. Fifteen years later, Jane has moved to London, where she's become friends with bohemians Nigel and Colette. A political bombing and an affair with aloof (and married) American writer Clay West lead Jane to confront her long-buried guilt over her parents' unhappiness and father's death.

A retiring children's book author looking to secure her legacy tries to get the beautiful Maine coast where her novels are set donated to a trust, but must first convince the shareholders, one of which is her best friend.

In this book, Phyllis Trible examines four Old Testament narratives of suffering in ancient Israel: Hagar, Tamar, an unnamed concubine and the daughter of Jephthah. These stories are for Trible the "substance of life", which may imspire new beginnings and by interpreting these stories of outrage and suffering on behalf of their female victims, the author recalls a past that is all to embodied in the present, and prays that these terrors shall not come to pass again. "Texts of Terror" is perhaps Trible's most readable book, that brings biblical scholarship within the grasp of the non-specialist. These "sad stories" about women in the Old Testament prompt much refelction on contemporary misuse of the Bible, and therefore have considerable relevance today.

Tender Points is a narrative fractured by trauma. Named after the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, the book-length lyric essay explores sexual violence, chronic pain, and patriarchy through lived experience and pop culture.First published in 2015, this new edition includes an afterword by the author.

When the austere and moving title story of this collection appeared in The New Yorker in 1993, it inspired two memorable film adaptations, and John Updike selected it for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In these ten stories, Alice Elliott Dark visits the fictional town of Wynnemoor and its residents, present and past, with skill, compassion, and wit. By turns funny, sad, and disturbing, these are stories of remarkable power.