Jane Smiley

Follows the saga of the Cook family. Cook's kingdom is a fertile farm that spans 1,000 acres, but the seeds of its destruction are sown when the patriarch, Larry Cook, impulsively decides to distribute it among his three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline.

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children. Beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly in the Langdons' story.

As her husband's obsessions with science take a darker turn on the eve of World War II, Margaret Mayfield is forced to consider the life she has so carefully constructed.

In the wake of the 2003 Academy Awards, a group of friends and family gathers in the Hollywood hills for ten transformative days of love, memories, gossip, movies, and more, including Max, an Oscar-winning writer/director whose career is waning; his lover Elena; his ex-wife, film star Zoe Cunningham; their daughter Isabel; and others.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes a brilliant literary thriller set in Manhattan that’s “as taut and chilling as anything Hitchcock put on film" (San Francisco Chronicle). “A first-rate cliffhanger.” —The New York Times Book Review

Alice Ellis is a Midwestern refugee living in Manhattan. Still recovering from a painful divorce, she depends on...

From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, a rousing novel that follows two young women fleeing a divided America: one running toward a dazzling future and the other running from a troubled past. Winter, 1855. America's future is precarious; civil war looms on the horizon. After her abolitionist husband is murdered in the lawless Kansas Territory, Lidie Newton returns, in mourning, to her hometown of Quincy, Illinois. But her sisters have...

A novel of greed and self-delusion set in the economic boom of the 1980s. Joe Stratford, a divorced 40-year old realtor, wants a new start. Marcus Burns, a former IRS agent, has some get-rich-quick schemes he thinks will interest Joe. Joe betrays his principles to go along with the schemes.-- (Source of description not identified).

"Essays that show how Smiley draws inspiration from across literary history to invigorate her own writing. Among the authors she examines are Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halldor Laxness, and Jessica Mitford"-- Provided by publisher.

Seventh-grader Abby Lovitt grows up on her family's California horse ranch in the 1960s, learning to train the horses her father sells and trying to reconcile her strict religious upbringing with her own ideas about life.