Diane Johnson

A classic of alternative biography and feminist writing, this empathetic and witty book gives due to a "lesser" figure of history, Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, who was brilliant, unconventional, and at odds with the constraints of Victorian life.
“Many people have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table. . . . He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. . . . We forget that there were other family members at the...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of Le Divorce, a dazzling meditation on the mysteries of the "wispy but material" family ghosts who shape us. Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of floating down the Mississippi and off to see the world. Years later, at home in France, a French friend teases her: 'Indifference to history--that's why you Americans seem so naive and don't really know where...

A writer and his family are snowbound in a hotel and are haunted by either the hotel itself or the writer's dementia.

Ivy Tarro comes to San Francisco's great Alta Buena hospital with a minor medical problem, but suddenly her life is endangered while around her swirl the exploding, and sometimes scandalous, dramas of hospital life.

"Chloe, a contented and unliberated wife and mother, follows her physician husband on a visit to Iran. When he is summoned home, she has no choice but to continue on alone."--

Read throughout the world, admired by Dostoevsky and translated by Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience. But his enormous popularity and his continuing influence on literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic accomplishments...