Alison Lurie

Virginia Miner, a fifty-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children's folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel. Also in London is Vinnie's colleague Fred Turner,...

In this “excellent” novel of “rare understanding” from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, culture shock consumes a young Harvard couple in Los Angeles (The New York Times).
 
When his mentor at Harvard University suddenly leaves for Washington, Paul Cattleman finds himself adrift in the wilds of academia. After losing his fellowship, he is out of work and one thesis short of a PhD....

In this comedy by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a biographer out to vindicate a neglected female artist learns that the truth is never tidy.
 
Polly Alter is through with men. Recovering from her divorce, she has taken a year off from her museum job to write a biography of Lorin Jones, a sensitive painter who died young and nearly forgotten. Polly is determined to bring the artist the public acclaim she deserves,...

An artists’ colony is a false paradise for a frustrated writer in this “witty, knowing, and perceptive” novel from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author (The New Yorker).
 
The mansion is called Illyria, but for the writers and artists who flock there each summer, it’s a Garden of Eden where every artistic curiosity is explored. Away from family, friends, and ordinary responsibilities, the creative...

A novel of childlike wonder and adult discord during the Great Depression—by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Nowhere City.
 
Dozing in the back seat of her father’s car, Mary Ann Hubbard is the happiest eight-year-old in the country. It’s 1935, and she and her parents are going to spend Fourth of July weekend at her headmistress’s farm in upstate New York. Joining them are the Zimmerns,...

"In this candid and bluntly humorous collection of essays on a wide range of topics, Lurie begins with a portrait of her life at Radcliffe during World War II when the smartest women in the country were treated like second-class citizens, the most scholarly among them expected to work in factories to support the war effort. She moves on to her unheralded, clumsy attempts and near failure to be a writer and, finally having reached a level of recognition,...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author dishes up a surprising satire about two couples making mischief on a college campus.
Unabridged CDs - 7 CDs, 9 hours