Showing results by author "Hilma Wolitzer" in All Categories

From her many well-loved novels, Hilma Wolitzer - now 91 years old and at the top of her game - has gained a reputation as one of our best fiction writers. These collected short stories - most of them originally published in magazines including Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s and 1970s, along with a new story that brings her early characters into the present - are evocative of an era that still resonates deeply today.

When Edward Schuyler - a modest and bookish 62-year-old science teacher - is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. There are plenty of unattached women around, but a healthy, handsome, available man is a rare and desirable creature. Edward receives phone calls from widows seeking love, or at least lunch, while well-meaning friends try to set him up at dinner parties. The problem is that Edward doesn’t feel available. He’s still mourning his beloved wife, Bee, and prefers solitude and the familiar routine of work, gardening, and bird-watching.

Alice Brill wakes up one day with a vague but nagging sensation of unease in her chest that signals trouble. Is it her marriage - drifting along for years on autopilot - that's so troubling? Her unrealized aspirations as a writer? Her unsettled younger son? Or is it something about her father, once a prominent surgeon but now slipping deeper into senility in a nursing home? There is also the matter of the writer whose book she's editing in her new profession as a "book doctor".

Summer Reading is the story of three women whose disparate lives intersect in the Hamptons. Lissy Snyder, a beautiful, emotionally needy newlywed, is the unwilling stepmother of her husband’s hostile children. Her eavesdropping housecleaner, Michelle, a local, is resentful of the moneyed arrogance of the vacationing “invaders” and can’t get a commitment from her fisherman boyfriend. Solitary, bookish Angela Graves harbors the shameful memory of a disastrous affair....

Another day! And then another and another and another. It seemed as if it would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful way. But of course it wouldn’t; everyone knows that. In this collection, Hilma Wolitzer invites us inside the private world of domestic bliss, seen mostly through the lens of Paulie and Howard’s gloriously ordinary marriage. From hasty weddings to meddlesome neighbours and ex-wives who just won’t leave, Wolitzer captures the tensions, contradictions and unexpected detours of daily life with wit, candour and an acutely observant eye.

Scritti tra gli anni Sessanta e Settanta e apparsi su diverse riviste, come "Esquire" e "The Saturday Evening Post", questi stupefacenti racconti legati tra loro seguono l'altalenante matrimonio di una donna e di suo marito Howard, addentrandosi con intelligenza e umorismo nella sfera domestica per esplorare problematiche legate al sesso, al desiderio, alla maternità, alla depressione, alla quotidianità.