A chance encounter on a train leads painter Christine Ward to wonder whether Orin Pierce, her beloved college friend, believed dead for two decades, may actually be alive. As she begins to track down the man she believes he might be, she finds herself in the grip of a troubling past she thought she had come to terms with. In her search through the tangles of truth and illusion, memory and dream, she questions her roles as lover, mother, artist, and mourner of the dead. This haunting literary thriller is an uncompromising portrait of a contemporary woman in crisis.

Dorrie Gilbert, a potter who lives alone, is completely unprepared for motherhood when her oddball, overweight, and orphaned nephew, Hugo, comes to live with her, demanding to know the truth about his parents and horrified that she doesn't own a television so he can watch the soap opera he's devoted to. As Dorrie and Hugo attempt to work things out, each learns some hard and surprising, but deeply satisfying truths about real life.

Betsy Ruscoe, a single university professor in her mid-30s, is pregnant, and the man she thought she loved is not interested in fatherhood. At the same time, her dying mother begs Betsy to find the woman who gave her up for adoption at birth fifty years ago and then disappeared. Betsy struggles to cope with the changes in her life as she also sets out on a quest to uncover her mother's surprising history.

Cordelia Miller, an endearing young misfit in a scholarly, cultured family, loves junk food, TV, and the son of the local grocer. Her attempt to escape her stifling background and find her way in the world takes her on a classic journey from innocence to experience. She encounters a varied cast of characters—some comic, some calamitous—and, in the end, discovers her true vocation.

The world of this novel moves back in time as the layers are peeled away to reveal the truth about a long-ago family tragedy that impacts the characters' lives for years after. Beginning with a young college student haunted by her own choices and ending with the surprisingly serene image of an aging woman looking back on her turbulent life, the story encompasses a panorama of events set against the changing social backdrop of the middle years of the 20th century.

Rosie Mortimer, celebrity gardener with a successful TV show, has a pleasantly uneventful life with her undemanding beau. Her gay son and his partner live nearby. When her estranged daughter, Susannah, product of a fractured family, returns to Rosie's Connecticut town with her husband, a former priest, to open a restaurant, the tense relationships among these three build to a near-tragedy. Rosie is forced to face the mistakes and failures that have plagued her—and Susannah, who has her own demons, learns to forgive.

Emily Lime and her equally palindromic dog, Otto, live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (zip code 11211), in a warm community of friends and fellow artists. Her life becomes more complicated when she falls in love with Marcus, a dog-walker and fellow Scrabble nut, whose father is Emily's shady ex-husband who wants the lovable Emily dead. A mystery unravels, a valuable lost cache of paintings is found, and Emily's life changes in ways she could not have anticipated.

"A witty and readable (and fetchingly illustrated and glossed) excursion through the history of handwriting." --The Wall Street JournalLet a self-confessed "penmanship nut" take you on a tour of the strange and beautiful world of handwriting. Since her Catholic school days learning the Palmer Method, Kitty Burns Florey has been in love with handwriting, and can't imagine a world where schools forego handwriting drills in favor of teaching something called keyboarding. In this "winsome mix of memoir and call to arms" (Chicago Tribune), Florey weaves together the evolution of writing implements and scripts, pen-collecting societies, the golden age of American penmanship, and the growth in popularity of handwriting analysis, and asks the question: Is writing by hand really no longer necessary in today's busy world? "Charmingly composed and handsomely presented," Script & Scribble...

Once wildly popular in grammar schools across the country, sentence diagramming has fallen out of fashion. But are we that much worse for not knowing the word-mapping method?Now, in this illustrated personal history that any language lover will adore, Kitty Burns Florey explores the rise and fall of sentence diagramming, including its invention by a mustachioed man named Brainerd "Brainy" Kellogg and his wealthy accomplice Alonzo Reed ... the inferior "balloon diagram" predecessor ... and what diagrams of sentences by Hemingway, Welty, Proust, Kerouac and other famous writers reveal about them.Florey also offers up her own common-sense approach to learning and using good grammar. And she answers some of literature's most pressing questions: Was Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper a better grammarian? What are the silliest grammar rules? And what's Gertude Stein got to do with any of it?