Elizabeth Strout

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of charactersLucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and moreas they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, What does anyones life mean? Its autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer...

"Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two...

"Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love...

"Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. 'William,' she confesses, 'has always been a mystery to me.' Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret - one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the...

"As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might," writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. "It's the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are." The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously...

Elizabeth Strout “animates the ordinary with an astonishing force,” wrote The New Yorker on the publication of her Pulitzer Prize–winning Olive Kitteridge. The San Francisco Chronicle praised Strout’s “magnificent gift for humanizing characters.” Now the acclaimed author returns with a stunning novel as powerful and moving as any work in contemporary literature.
 
Haunted by the freak...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The debut novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant mother, and a parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's secrets.
“One of those rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place.”—The New York Times Book Review

Before...

The four-part drama that tells the story of a seemingly placid New England town that is actually wrought with illicit affairs, crime and tragedy, all told through the lens of Olive, whose wicked wit and harsh demeanor mask a warm but troubled heart and staunch moral center. The story spans 25 years and focuses on Olive's relationships with her husband, Henry, the good-hearted and kindly town pharmacist; their son, Christopher, who resents his mother's...

One of the Middle East's most celebrated writers, Rabih Alameddine, discusses his novel An Unnecessary Woman, an intimate and moving portrait of a reclusive book-loving 72-year-old Lebanese woman who views her complicated past through the lens of her favorite works of literature. In conversation with Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge). Mia Dillon will read an excerpt.