<div>New takes on nature by award-winning poets and writers, from Russell Banks to Lily Tuck and many more. In Natural Causes, a provocative collection of radical reinventions of the genre of nature writing, we encounter shrimp farms and spoonbills, maize husks and Austrian woods, tarantulas and eels, multitudinous winds that pollinate or desiccate&mdash;nature in all its myriad forms, right down to photons, neutrons, neutrinos, and, yes, even Godzilla, the Sasquatch, and some of nature&rsquo;s other fictive and folkloric monsters.</div>

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Natural Causes

<div>A &ldquo;captivating&rdquo; portrait of a long marriage and a meditation on how chance can affect life from the National Book Award winner (The Washington Post). &ldquo;His hand is growing cold, still she holds it&rdquo; is how this novel that contemplates love, after a husband&rsquo;s sudden death, begins. This riveting and deeply moving story unfolds over a single night, as Nina, numb with grief, sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. There, she recalls the defining moments of their forty-three-year-long union, beginning with their meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a mathematician&mdash;a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love. As Nina revisits select memories&mdash;real and imagined&mdash;Lily Tuck reveals the intimacies, dark secrets, and overwhelming joys that shaped the couple&rsquo;s life together.</div>

I Married You for Happiness

<div>This National Book Award&ndash;winning author&rsquo;s autobiographical novel is a &ldquo;layered portrait of a family and the historical eras it lived through&rdquo; (The Boston Globe). &ldquo;Tuck is a genius.&rdquo; &mdash;Los Angeles Book Review Her father is a German movie producer who lives in Italy. Her mother is a beautiful, artistically talented woman who resides in New York. As their child, Liliane&rsquo;s life is divided between those two very different worlds&mdash;worlds that inspire her to find herself in both the present and in her ancestors&rsquo; pasts. A shy and observant only child with a vivid imagination, Liliane finds herself exploring her family&rsquo;s vibrant history&mdash;which includes such renowned and diverse figures as the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the tragic Mary Queen of Scots&mdash;and piecing together their vivid lives. And in doing so, what is revealed is an astonishing and riveting exploration of self, humanity, and family. Told with Lily Tuck&rsquo;s inimitable elegance and peppered with documents, photos, and a rich and varied array of characters, &ldquo;this autobiographical novel creates a portrait of the writer as a young woman&rdquo; (The New Yorker).</div>

The Double Life of Liliane

<div>National Book Award-Winning Author: A second wife is haunted by the first in a novel that “expertly deploys revelations like land mines” (The Minneapolis Star Tribune). From the acclaimed author of I Married You for Happiness, Sisters is a “masterpiece” (The Boston Globe) that gives a very different portrait of marital life, exposing the intricacies of a new marriage sprung from betrayal. Lily Tuck’s unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the unbanishable presence of his first wife—known only as she. Obsessed with her, our narrator moves through her days presided over by the all-too-real ghost of the first marriage, fantasizing about how the first wife lives her life. Will the narrator ever equal she intellectually, or ever forget the betrayal that lies between them? And what of the secrets between her husband and she, from which the narrator is excluded? The daring and precise build up to an eerily wonderful denouement is a triumph of subtlety and surprise, in a riveting psychological portrait of marriage, infidelity, and obsession.</div>

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Sisters

<div>From the National Book Award-winning author of I Married You for Happiness: “Tuck packs a small universe and decades of emotional history into each story.”—Entertainment Weekly (A-) An artist learns that her deceased ex-husband had an especially illicit affair years before his death. A couple living in Thailand worries about the mental stability of their best friend, a U. S. army captain. On a ship bound for Antarctica, a retired couple strains to hold their forty-year marriage together. And a French family flees to Lima in the 1940s, with devastating consequences for their daughter’s young nanny. These “evocative stories of beautiful language and masterful economy” (The Boston Globe) span the better part of the twentieth century and almost every continent, excavating both the opportunities that arise from loss and the moments that knock lives onto a collision course and an uncertain future. “Reminiscent of the exquisite short stories of Edith Pearlman…We become intimate witnesses to these private lives falling apart and, in some cases, coming back together.”—The Boston Globe “For me, the most thrilling short stories conjure the psychological depth and chronological sweep typical of the novel. The ten stories in Lily Tuck’s The House at Belle Fontaine all do this.”—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) “Tuck is a genius”—Los Angeles Times</div>

The House at Belle Fontaine

<div>The National Book Award winner explores the hidden dynamics of relationships with “lean, intriguing, formally inventive prose” in this collection (Kirkus Reviews). A New York Times Editor’s Choice In Heathcliff Redux, the novella that begins this collection, a married woman reads Wuthering Heights—just as she falls under the erotic and destructive spell of her own Heathcliff. In the stories that follow, a single photograph illuminates the intricate web of connections between friends at an Italian café; a forgotten act of violence in New York’s Carl Schurz Park returns to haunt the present; and a woman is prompted by a flurry of mysterious emails to recall her time as a member of the infamous Rajneesh cult. With keen psychological insight and delicate restraint, Lily Tuck pries open the desires, doubts, and secret motives of her characters and exposes their vulnerabilities to the light. Sharp and unflinching, the novella and stories together form an exquisitely crafted collection.</div>

Heathcliff Redux

<div>In an elegant and penetrating first short-story collection, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived, Lily Tuck's characters travel to unknown, exotic places and, while there, find themselves deeply immersed in observation -- of the natives, the local customs, the foreign landscape -- in an effort to discern some elemental truth about who they themselves are. Instead, these women meet with disorientation, confusion; they are disappointed by the people closest to them -- lovers, husbands, family members. Finally, they arrive at the sometimes heartbreaking but ultimately optimistic realization that the answers they seek lie not in other people or places but within themselves. Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived is a brilliant collection from a writer of exceptional poise and insight.</div>

Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived

<div>Lily, Molly, and Inez are women of a certain age, of a certain bearing, of a certain class. Late one dire night, Molly telephones from Connecticut to catch Lily up with the news: Inez&#39;s corpse -- near-naked but wearing boots -- has been discovered propped up &#34;like a broom&#34; in a corner of her Soho loft. It is an occasion ripe for an all-night heart-to-heart conversation, bouncing deliriously from one evasion to the next -- until the pair of talk-crazy, talk-weary women have successfully diverted themselves with all the wonderfully vagrant stuff of life . . . with everything, in fact, except grief.</div>

Interviewing Matisse, or The Woman Who Died Standing Up

<div>The first biography in any language of one of the most celebrated Italian writers of the twentieth century.Born in 1912 to an unconventional family of modest means, Elsa Morante grew up with an independent spirit, a formidable will, and an unshakable commitment to writing. Forced to hide from the Fascists during World War II in a remote mountain hut with her husband, renowned author Alberto Moravia, she re-emerged at war's end to take her place among the premier Italian writers of her day. When Rome was film capital of the world, she counted Pasolini, Visconti, and the young Bertolucci among her circle of friends. She was charismatic, beautiful, and fiercely intelligent; her marriage, a passionate union of literary giants, captivated a nation; her love affairs were intense and often tragic. And until now few Americans have known of this remarkable woman and her powerful, original talent.</div>

Woman of Rome

<div>&#8220;Brimming with rich descriptions of a beautiful country&#8230;.The News From Paraguay evolves from a quirky, elegant tale of an unconventional love affair into a sweeping epic.&#8221; &#8212; Fort Worth Star-TelegramLily Tuck&#8217;s impressive novel offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of 19th century Paraguay, a largely untouched wilderness where European and American figures mix with the Spanish aristocracy of the capital and the indigenous peoples from the surrounding areas. The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano&#8212;the future dictator of Paraguay&#8212;begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and a horse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Asunci&#243;n and reigns there as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's ill-fated imperial dream&#8212;one fueled by a heedless arrogance that will devastate all of Paraguay.With the urgency of the narrative, rich and intimate detail, and a wealth of skillfully layered characters, The News from Paraguay recalls the epic novels of Gabriel Garc&#237;a M&#225;rquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.</div>

Lily Tuck
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Books By Lily Tuck (9 Books)