The Three Weissmanns of Westport

The Three Weissmanns of Westport
Author: Cathleen Schine
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2010-02-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429936371

A New York Times Best Seller A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Betty Weissmann has just been dumped by her husband of forty-eight years. Exiled from her elegant New York apartment by her husband's mistress, she and her two middle-aged daughters, Miranda and Annie, regroup in a run-down Westport, Connecticut, beach cottage. In Schine's playful and devoted homage to Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, the impulsive sister is Miranda, a literary agent entangled in a series of scandals, and the more pragmatic sister is Annie, a library director, who feels compelled to move in and watch over her capricious mother and sister. Schine's witty, wonderful novel The Three Weissmanns of Westport "is simply full of pleasure: the pleasure of reading, the pleasure of Austen, and the pleasure that the characters so rightly and humorously pursue....An absolute triumph" (The Cleveland Plain Dealer).

The Grammarians

The Grammarians
Author: Cathleen Schine
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374712190

An enchanting, comic love letter to sibling rivalry and the English language. From the author compared to Nora Ephron and Nancy Mitford, not to mention Jane Austen, comes a new novel celebrating the beauty, mischief, and occasional treachery of language. The Grammarians are Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret “twin” tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Daphne, copy editor and grammar columnist, devotes herself to preserving the dignity and elegance of Standard English. Laurel, who gives up teaching kindergarten to write poetry, is drawn, instead, to the polymorphous, chameleon nature of the written and spoken word. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war, absurdly but passionately, over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition. Cathleen Schine has written a playful and joyful celebration of the interplay of language and life. A dazzling comedy of sisterly and linguistic manners, a revelation of the delights and stresses of intimacy, The Grammarians is the work of one of our great comic novelists at her very best.

Alice in Bed

Alice in Bed
Author: Cathleen Schine
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2012-01-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466805110

Stricken by a mysterious malady, college sophomore Alice Brody has suddenly lost the use of her legs. How does a bright, beautiful, and now immobile young woman proceed with her passions? As she convalesces in a Manhattan hospital, Alice finds herself attended by a motley group of visitors: indifferent nurses, doctors both good and bad, divorcing parents, and eccentric relatives. But Alice is a creature of many charms, whose wit can enchant those bearing even the worst bedside manner. With a captivating heroine of great comic depth, Cathleen Schine's Alice in Bed is balm for whatever ails you.

They May Not Mean To, But They Do

They May Not Mean To, But They Do
Author: Cathleen Schine
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-06-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374712204

From one of America’s greatest comic novelists, a hilarious new novel about aging, family, loneliness, and love The Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws, and same-sex spouses. But families don’t just grow, they grow old, and the clan’s matriarch, Joy, is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would have wished. When Joy’s beloved husband dies, Molly and Daniel have no shortage of solutions for their mother’s loneliness and despair, but there is one challenge they did not count on: the reappearance of an ardent suitor from Joy’s college days. And they didn’t count on Joy herself, a mother suddenly as willful and rebellious as their own kids. The New York Times–bestselling author Cathleen Schine has been called “full of invention, wit, and wisdom that can bear comparison to [ Jane] Austen’s own” (The New York Review of Books), and she is at her best in this intensely human, profound, and honest novel about the intrusion of old age into the relationships of one loving but complicated family. They May Not Mean To, But They Do is a radiantly compassionate look at three generations, all coming of age together.

Ana of California

Ana of California
Author: Andi Teran
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2015-06-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0698156382

A modern take on the classic coming-of-age novel, inspired by Anne of Green Gables In the grand tradition of Anne of Green Gables, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and The Three Weissmanns of Westport, Andi Teran’s captivating debut novel offers a contemporary twist on a beloved classic. Fifteen-year-old orphan Ana Cortez has just blown her last chance with a foster family. It’s a group home next—unless she agrees to leave East Los Angeles for a farm trainee program in Northern California. When she first arrives, Ana can’t tell a tomato plant from a blackberry bush, and Emmett Garber is skeptical that this slight city girl can be any help on his farm. His sister Abbie, however, thinks Ana might be just what they need. Ana comes to love Garber Farm, and even Emmett has to admit that her hard work is an asset. But when she inadvertently stirs up trouble in town, Ana is afraid she might have ruined her last chance at finding a place to belong.

The Evolution of Jane

The Evolution of Jane
Author: Cathleen Schine
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2011
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 054752031X

In four previous novels, Cathleen Schine has enchanted readers with her special brand of brainy wit and wry affection for her endearingly flawed characters. Now the best-selling author of The Love Letter takes a hilarious trip to the Galapagos Islands with a comedy of natural selection. Jane Barlow Schwartz is obsessed with one question: why did her best friend Martha stop being her best friend? The two girls, distant cousins, had shared idyllic childhood summers in the New England seaside town of Barlow, named for their family's founding fathers. Martha was not just Jane's friend but her idol, her soul mate, her confidante. Then, somewhere along the line, the friendship ended. What went wrong? Was it the family feud, which their parents spoke of only in hushed tones? What did Jane's dotty great-aunt reveal to Martha on her deathbed? Did Jane do something unforgivable? When the cousins are reunited unexpectedly on a tour of the Galapagos, they meet Darwin head on. In the pristine Pacific waters, amid blue-footed boobies and red-lipped batfish, Jane traces back through her Yankee-Cuban-Jewish ancestry to try to pinpoint the splitting event, the moment when Martha was no longer the Martha she knew. In the process, she ponders the origin of species and the origin of friendship, the instincts of exotic wildlife and of her eccentric shipmates, the evolution of nature and of her life. The result is an antic mating of family saga and natural history. Bearing Schine's astute ability to sum up modern relationships (People), as well as her wonderfully inventive comic voice (New York Times Book Review), The Evolution of Jane sparkles with keen observations on the species known as humans. Above all, it is a warm-hearted tribute to that unique adaptation of girlhood, the selection of a very best friend.

Rameau's Niece

Rameau's Niece
Author: Cathleen Schine
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-04-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547548362

A “gem of a novel” that sends up marriage, academia, and literary stardom, by the New York Times–bestselling author of They May Not Mean To, But They Do (Publishers Weekly). In this delightful novel from an author who “has been favored in so many ways by the muse of comedy,” we meet Margaret Nathan, the brilliant but forgetful author of an unlikely bestseller (The New York Review of Books). Happily married to a benevolently egotistical, slightly dull but sexy professor, Margaret seems blessed—until she finds herself seduced by an eighteenth-century novel she discovers in the library. Wrapped in its lascivious world, Margaret begins to imitate its protagonist, embarking on a hilarious jaunt around Manhattan in search of renewed passion. Will she find fulfillment through her escapades or settle for her husband? Part romantic comedy, part intellectual parody, Rameau’s Niece is wise, affecting, and thoroughly entertaining.

The Last Book Party

The Last Book Party
Author: Karen Dukess
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250225469

*A July 2019 Indie Next List Great Read* *One of Parade's Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2019* *An O Magazine Best Beach Read of 2019* *A New York Post Best Beach Read of 2019* “The Last Book Party is a delight. Reading this story of a young woman trying to find herself while surrounded by the bohemian literary scene during a summer on the Cape in the late '80s, I found myself nodding along in so many moments and dreading the last page. Karen Dukess has rendered a wonderful world to spend time in.” —Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six A propulsive tale of ambition and romance, set in the publishing world of 1980’s New York and the timeless beaches of Cape Cod. In the summer of 1987, 25-year-old Eve Rosen is an aspiring writer languishing in a low-level assistant job, unable to shake the shadow of growing up with her brilliant brother. With her professional ambitions floundering, Eve jumps at the chance to attend an early summer gathering at the Cape Cod home of famed New Yorker writer Henry Grey and his poet wife, Tillie. Dazzled by the guests and her burgeoning crush on the hosts’ artistic son, Eve lands a new job as Henry Grey’s research assistant and an invitation to Henry and Tillie’s exclusive and famed "Book Party"— where attendees dress as literary characters. But by the night of the party, Eve discovers uncomfortable truths about her summer entanglements and understands that the literary world she so desperately wanted to be a part of is not at all what it seems. A page-turning, coming-of-age story, written with a lyrical sense of place and a profound appreciation for the sustaining power of books, Karen Dukess's The Last Book Party shows what happens when youth and experience collide and what it takes to find your own voice.

She Is Me

She Is Me
Author: Cathleen Schine
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2007-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316028649

The Love Letter was a beloved and bestselling novel, and She Is Me is a return to that winning form -- a novel about women's friendships, love, and family.

The Orchid Affair

The Orchid Affair
Author: Lauren Willig
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2011-01-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101495456

Veteran governess Laura Grey joins the Selwick Spy School expecting to find elaborate disguises and thrilling adventures in service to the spy known as the Pink Carnation. She hardly expects her first assignment to be serving as governess for the children of André Jaouen, right-hand man to Bonaparte's minister of police. At first the job is as lively as Latin, but Laura begins to notice Jaouen's increasingly strange behavior. As Laura edges closer to her employer, she is surprised to learn that she has much in common with him. And Jaouen finds he's hired more than he's bargained for...