Mary Morris

One of NPR's Best Books of 2020 From the author of Nothing to Declare , a new travel narrative examining healing, redemption, and what it means to be a solo woman on the road. Mary Morris has long been a master memoirist...and has even more to teach us about the lengths to which we must go to reach our deepest selves. I loved this book.-Dani Shapiro, author of InheritanceIn the tradition of Wild by Cheryl Strayed and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, Mary Morris turns a personal catastrophe into a rich, multilayered memoir full of personal growth, family history, and thrilling travel.In February 2008 a casual afternoon of ice skating derailed the trip of a lifetime. Mary Morris was on the verge of a well-earned sabbatical, but instead she endured three months in a wheelchair, two surgeries, and extensive rehabilitation. On Easter Sunday, when she was supposed to be in Morocco, Morris was instead lying on the sofa reading Death in Venice, casting her eyes over these words again and again: He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers. Disaster shifted to possibility and Morris made a decision. When she was well enough to walk again (and her doctor wasn't sure she ever would), she would go all the way to the tigers.So begins a three-year odyssey that takes Morris to India in search of the world's most elusive apex predator. Her first lesson: don't look for a tiger because you won't find it--you look for signs of a tiger. And all unseen tigers, hiding in the bush, are referred to as she. Morris connects deeply with these magnificent and highly endangered animals, and her weeks on tiger safari also afford a new understanding of herself.Written in over a hundred short chapters, All the Way to the Tigers offers an elegiac, wry, and wise look at a woman on the road and the glorious, elusive creature she seeks.

From award-winning novelist and memoirist Mary Morris comes the story of a sleepy New Mexican community that must come to grips with a religious and political inheritance they never expected. Entrada de la Luna is the sort of town that ambitious children try to leave behind them. Poor health, broken marriages, and poverty are the norm, and luck is unusual. So when Miguel Torres notices an advertisement for a position looking after two small boys a few towns over, he jumps at the opportunity.Rachel Rothstein is not the sort of parent Miguel expected to be working for, though. A frustrated artist, Rachel moved her family away from New York looking for a fresh start, but so far New Mexico has not solved any of the problems they brought with them. But Miguel genuinely loves the work and he finds many of the Rothstein family's customs similar to ones he sees in his own community.Studded throughout this present-day narrative are historical vignettes following the ancestors of Entrada's residents, beginning in fifteenth-century Spain and moving forward to the discovery of America, highlighting the torture, pursuit, and resistance of the Jewish people throughout history, leading to the founding of the enclave that Miguel now calls home. A beautiful novel of shared history, Gateway to the Moon is a moving and memorable portrait of home and community.

Traveling from the highland desert of northern Mexico to the steaming jungles of Honduras, from the seashore of the Caribbean to the exquisite highlands of Guatemala, Mary Morris, a celebrated writer of both fiction and nonfiction, confronts the realities of place, poverty, machismo, and selfhood. As she experiences the rawness and precariousness of life in another culture, Morris begins to hear echoes of her own life and her own sense of deprivation. And she begins, too, to overcome the struggles of the past that have held her back personally; as in the very best travel writing, Morris effectively explores her own soul while exploring new terrain and new experience. By crossing such boundaries throughout the pages of Nothing to Declare , she sets new frontiers for herself as a woman—and as a writer.

Award-winning novelist Mary Morris weaves together an unsolved family mystery, a poignant coming-of-age story, and a little-known corner of World War II history in this lyrical novel of family, loss and, ultimately, love.Thirty years ago, Laura’s mother, Viola, went missing. She left behind her purse, her keys and her mysterious paintings of a red house. Viola was never found, and her family never recovered. Laura, an artist herself, held on to the paintings. On the back of each work, her mother scrawled in Italian, “I will not be here forever.” The family never understood what Viola meant. Decades later, at a crossroads in her marriage and her life, Laura returns to Italy, where her parents met after World War II. Laura spent the earliest years of her childhood there before the family moved to New Jersey and settled into an American dream that eventually became a nightmare. Viola, who claimed to be an orphan, staunchly refused to speak of her life before marriage. In Italy, Laura finds herself on a strange scavenger hunt to solve the puzzle of her mother’s lost years. She is certain that the paintings of the red house hold the answer to her mother’s past and her search takes her from her hometown of Brindisi, deep into Puglia where she encounters a man who knew her mother and who illuminates little-known secrets of Italy’s Second World War. Blending elements of true crime with settings that evoke Elena Ferrante, Laura follows her mother’s trajectory as she ventures north to Naples, Turin and finally home. Along the way, she confronts the dark truth of her mother's story and at last makes sense of her own.

Acclaimed author Mary Morris returns to her Chicago roots in this sweeping novel that brilliantly captures the dynamic atmosphere and the dazzling music of the Jazz Age.In the midst of boomtown Chicago, two Jewish families have suffered terrible blows. The Lehrmans, who run a small hat factory, lost their beloved son Harold in a blizzard. The Chimbrovas, who run a saloon, lost three of their boys on the SS Eastland when it sank in 1915. Each family holds out hope that one of their remaining children will rise to carry on the family business. But Benny Lehrman has no interest in making hats. His true passion is piano—especially jazz.At night he sneaks down to the South Side, slipping into predominantly black clubs to hear jazz groups play. Along the way he meets a black trumpeter, a man named Napoleon who becomes Benny’s close friend and musical collaborator. Their adventures together take Benny far from the life he knew as a delivery boy. Pearl Chimbrova recognizes their talent and invites them to start playing at her family’s saloon, which Napoleon dubs The Jazz Palace. Even as the novel charts the story of its characters, it also tells the tale of the city where they live. It is a world of gangsters, musicians, and clubs, in which black musicians are no freer than they were before the Civil War, white youths head down to the South Side to “slum,” and Al Capone and Louis Armstrong become legends. As The Jazz Palace steams through the 1920s, Benny, Pearl, and Napoleon forge a bond that is as memorable as it is lasting.

This story of a middle-aged woman's odyssey down the Mississippi River is a funny, beautifully written, and poignant tale of a journey that transforms a lifeIn fall 2005 acclaimed travel writer Mary Morris set off down the Mississippi in a battered old houseboat called the River Queen, with two river rats named Tom and Jerry--and a rat terrier, named Samantha Jean, who hated her. It was a time of emotional turmoil for Morris. Her father had just died; her daughter was leaving home; life was changing all around her. It was then she decided to return to the Midwest where she was from, to the river she remembered, where her father had played jazz piano in tiny towns.Morris describes living like a pirate and surviving a tornado. Because of Katrina, oil prices, and drought, the river was often empty--a ghost river--and Morris experienced it as Joliet and Marquette had four hundred years earlier. As she learned to pilot her beloved River Queen without running aground and made peace with Samantha Jean, Morris got her groove back, reconnecting to her past. More important, she came away with her best book, a bittersweet travel tale told in the very real voice of a smart, sad, funny, gutsy, and absolutely appealing woman.

Morris present an unforgettable account of her 1986 trip through China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. As in Nothing to Declare, her celebrated travelogue of South America, Morris combines vivid portrayals of people and historical portraits of Soviet events with a more personal journey--her search for roots, family, and her ancestral home in the Ukraine. Reading tour.

This compassionate novel--published in paperback in time for Mother's Day--explores how women learn to be mothers and celebrates the resilience of all those who raise children. Abandoned by her mother at age seven, Ivy is a new single mother who must cope with financial difficulties and a demanding infant.

Mary Morris, the acclaimed author of "Nothing to Declare", the remarkable journal of a woman traveling alone, now brings us an absorbing and evocative novel of healing and forgiveness, love and war. THE WAITING ROOM is the intricate tale of three generations of women whose lives have been shaped by the essential experience of all women, that of waiting—for love to grow stronger, for wars to end, for life to move ahead. In its richly woven texture, its movements through time and space, the novel introduces us to the unforgettable members of the Coleman family: Zoe, who returns home after years away to confront her brother Badger’s break with reality—the result of taking too many drugs in Canada, where he fled to avoid the Vietnam War; June, Zoe’s mother, who first suffered a deep estrangement from her husband when he returned from World War II; and Naomi, the grandmother, who fled the pogroms of Russia.From the Home on the Road Motel to Badger’s residence at the austere Heartland Clinic, from the plains of the Midwest to the swamps of Florida, three women confront men, madness, dreams, and ultimately one another.Filled with humor and the wisdom of generations, THE WAITING ROOM is a novel of hope in the face of loss, of war and its casualties. It is also about freeing oneself from the dark side of waiting, and escaping into the light of love. Written in a magical, almost fablelike manner, and with the inimitable humor that informs the fiction of Mary Morris, THE WAITING ROOM fulfills the promise of Morris’ earlier work, which, from the start, has distinguished the author as a unique American voice.

Revenge is a compelling and psychologically complex story of female friendship, art, and life. When a young painter moves next door to a world class novelist with writer's block, the two women become entwined in a novel described by Michael Cunningham as "compelling and darkly beautiful . . . Never less than gripping, Revenge builds to the realm of the genuinely revelatory."

Performing research for a travel guide in the Caribbean, Maggie Conover is arrested in connection with the disappearance of her friend, the daughter of the island's revolutionary leader and despot. 20,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo. Tour.

When Tess Winterstone returns to her suburban childhood home after almost 30 years to attend a high school reunion, memories flood back, firmly shut doors open, and the betrayal by her father decades earlier comes to rest. Masterfully weaving the complexities of familial love and rosy 1950s suburban life with the dark underside of such a reality, Mary Morris movingly portrays a woman coming to terms with a warm and charming father's duplicity.

Angels & Aliens is Mary Morris's long-awaited memoir, confirming her status as a master of the genre.In Angels & Aliens , Mary Morris once again explores her experiences as a woman on the road, this time as a single parent, wandering with her daughter through Southern California and struggling to make it on her own. Posing as a believer, Morris infiltrates New Age groups, flies as an angel through the Crystal Cathedral, and becomes a member of the earth-based unit of the Ashtar command.As her relationship with her baby's father unravels and she is confronted with personal and financial setbacks, Morris tries to understand how other people cope with their lives, and places these systems of coping withing the broader context of American culture.Written with humor and hope, this travel memoir is both a life-affirming story of one woman's journey through the emotional terrain of the heart, and a clear-eyed journalist's account of the true nature of California as a state of exodus, home to sun seekers, spiritual believers, and cults. Combining her gift as a story teller, which is apparent in her fiction, and the powerful sense of place she brings to her nonfiction, Morris gives us a traveler's tale for the millennium when there's no place to go but up.

The Lifeguard combines Mary Morris's consummate craft as a storyteller with her gift for dramatic travel writing. In the title story, a teenage lifeguard sees his mystique among the girls on the beach dissolve in a panicked moment when he cannot save a child. In "The Glass-Bottom Boat," a mother on her first trip abroad learns about trust from a solicitous stranger.The Lifeguard is a powerful collection of ten short stories that shows Morris's great sensitivity to men and women at moments of turbulence, uncertainty, and crisis.

Fifteen stories focus on men and women facing disillusionment, failure, and the disappointments of modern life

Morris's stories range over vast territories, both emotional and geographical, from a summer romance by the swimming pool to reconciliations in a New York walk-up, from expeditions in the Rockies to encounters in the suburbs

At the center of ordinary circumstances gone awry and love warped by bad timing is urban planner Deborah Miles, her philandering husband Mark, her rebellious brother Zapp, her midwestern parents, and a handsome filmmaker

The dog is a rescue. He was dumped from a moving car right in front of Dr. Katz’s office. Pete, the vet technician, was on the stoop, smoking a cigarette, when it happened. Dropped like a sack of potatoes, Pete told Dr. Katz. Pete picked up the dog—a mangy black-and-white with deep dark eyes—and brought him to Dr. Katz, who was finishing up a Rottweiler with glass in its paw....

“The night he tried to strangle his wife, Daniel Clay was in the process of buying a Slovakian goldmine.” So opens “The Answer” by Mary Morris, a quiet, sun-soaked story of failure and self-delusion. Daniel, a disgraced financier, is a certain kind of protected person who believes his demons can be exorcised by quality of life control. With “The Answer,” Mary Morris humanizes the term “unreliable narrator,” which, when held up against a complex and fully drawn character such as Daniel, seems clinical. We ourselves are unreliable. So are our intimates. To tell a story is not an exercise in reliability. To tell a story is to navigate blind spots, those affectless pockets, and still manage to bring Daniel to “where he’d been going all along.” About the Author: Mary Morris is the author of fourteen books—six novels, three collections of short stories, and four travel memoirs, including The River Queen. Recently her short stories have appeared in such places as The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and Narrative. “The Answer” is part of a new collection of connected stories. The recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, Morris teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Her new novel, The Jazz Palace, set in Chicago during the Jazz Age will be published in the spring of 2015 by Knopf Doubleday. For more information visit her website. About Electric Literature: Electric Literature is an independent publisher amplifying the power of storytelling through digital innovation. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction. Stay connected with us through our eNewsletter (where you can win weekly prizes), Facebook, and Twitter, and find previous Electric Literature picks in the Recommended Reading archives.

1980. First Edition. 93 pages. Pictorial dust jacket over cloth. Green cloth covered boards with gilt. Colour photographs throughout. Pages and binding are presentable with no major defects. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. Overall a good condition item. Boards have mild shelf wear with light rubbing and corner bumping. Some light marking and sunning. Eric R. Unclipped jacket has light edge wear with minor chipping and creasing.

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