Susan Minot

A woman dying of cancer relives a weekend with the man of her dreams. For Ann Lord, who subsequently married three times, nothing equalled the passion she felt for her first love, a doctor from the Korean War whom she lost to another woman.

Twelve stories of women caught in the emotional turbulence of romance in Manhattan. For the twelve narrators of Susan Minot's breathtaking collection - artists and lawyers, teenagers and thirty-somethings - love in New York doesn't come easy. And as they struggle to reconcile their yearnings for romance with their needs for independence, they face resistance to emotional commitment at every turn. In intense snapshots of these women's most intimate...

A Boston Brahmin woman must choose between duty and passion when a former lover reenters her life. Born into an affluent New England family at the turn of the twentieth century, Lillian Eliot engages in the coming-of-age rituals traditional of her social status. But when she meets Walter Vail, a charming and spontaneous New Yorker, her world is opened to new possibilities. As the Great War erupts, Walter leaves for Europe and marries another woman,...

Using a single interlude-a brief encounter of old lovers, two bodies entwined on a bed at midday-Minot defines the distance that erupts at what seems to be the height of connection, as well as the extent to which the senses deceive, and the intensely private eroticism of fantasy and the imagination. Minot's lovers are mesmerizing in their individual journeys-one moving toward a kind of holy consummation, the other toward abnegation and blank despair....

Overcome by the power of memory, Ann Lord reveals a long-held secret to her concerned daughters. Constance is a content wife and mother. Nina is a restless single woman. Both are bedside when Ann calls out for the man she loved more than any other. But her daughters wonder who is Harris and what is his relation to their mother? Constance and Nina try to take stock of Ann's life as their mother is tended to by a night nurse as she journeys into her...

"In time for the one-year anniversary of the Trump Inauguration and the Women's March, this provocative, unprecedented anthology features original short stories from thirty bestselling and award-winning authors--including Alice Walker, Richard Russo, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Mary Higgins Clark, and Lee Child--with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen"-- This provocative,...