Laurie Colwin

This delightful comedy of manners and morals is about romantic friendship, romantic marriage, and romantic love--about four people who are good-hearted and sane, lucky and gifted, and who find one another. Knowing that happiness is an art form that requires energy, discipline, and talent, Guido, Holly, Vincnt, and Misty deal with jealousy, estrangement, and other perils involved in the search for love.

Happy All the Time

A unique feast for body and soul, "Home Cooking" shares the delightful pleasures of discovering cooking and eating good, simple food. Colwin combines her insightful, good-humored writing style with her lifelong passion for wonderful food in such essays as "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant", "Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir" and "Stuffed Breast of Veal: A Bad Idea".

A Writer in the Kitchen

Home Cooking

Family Happiness

"Laurie Colwin's beautiful final book, A Big Storm Knocked It Over, is funny and moving and rich with complicated happiness--a love story for anyone who tends to overthink things, a comic novel about trying to find a place in the world." -- Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It In her fifth and final novel, acclaimed author Laurie Colwin explores marriage and friendship, motherhood and careers, as experienced by a cast of delightfully idiosyncratic Manhattanites. At once a hilarious social commentary and an insightful, sophisticated modern romance, A Big Storm Knocked It Over stands as a living tribute to one of contemporary fiction's most original voices.

A Big Storm Knocked It Over

A Writer Returns to the Kitchen

More Home Cooking

One of the most beloved novels from the critically acclaimed novelist Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving explores a woman's attempts to reconcile her rock-and-roll past with her significantly more sedate family life as a wife and mother. As a bored graduate student, Geraldine Colshares is plucked from her too-tame existence when she is invited to tour as the only white backup singer for Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes. The exciting years she spends as a Shakette are a mixed blessing, however, because when she ultimately submits to a conventional life of marriage and children, she finds herself stuck in bittersweet recollections of life on the road. As she grudgingly searches for a path toward happiness that doesn't involve a Day-Glo neon minidress, readers will be enchanted by Geraldine's attempts to grow up, even though she's already an adult. Employing Colwin's usual dry wit and candor, Goodbye Without Leaving is a classic novel from the writer hailed as "ingenious, comic, and spirited" by the Boston Globe and "a writer of originality and vision" by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Goodbye Without Leaving

This collection of stories about love and privacy is serious , funny, tender, and alive with the elegance and spirit that characterize Laurie Colwin's work. In these stories, the reader moves among young men and women: pianists, historians, book illustrators, architects; women who are composed and inimitably sassy; and men who are magnetic, adventurous in love, or fiendishly elusive. They are people who are experiencing, often for the first time, the starting, enriching, and maddening complications of adult life.

The Lone Pilgrim

When Sam Bax, that charming daredevil of a Boston lawyer, sails his boat into a storm off the coast of Maine, Elizabeth "Olly" Bax, his wife and ardent sidekick, becomes a widow at the edge of seventy-seven. With no pretense of "courage", Olly grieves, coping with the warmth and awkwardness of family ties and trying to rethink her own life. Realizing that her risks are as daring as any of Sam's -- while he chanced life and limb, Olly risks her heart -- she finds that love can take some surprising turns. Laurie Colwin depics Olly's recovery with humor, compassion, and a decided lack of sentimentally, creating a real heroine who remains true to her heart and still manages to keep her head.

Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object

At night, some count sheep and others read mystery novels. I lie on the bed and start thinking about food.» Weaving reflections and memories of several decades between stoves and books along with her most infallible recipes, the novelist Laurie Colwin invites us to rediscover the pleasure of cooking with joy and without complexes. In chapters like Alone with an eggplant", "Vomiting dinners. My testimony" and "Stuffed veal fin. A Bad Idea," the author shares hilarious anecdotes--making pasta in a tiny apartment in late-1960s New York, feeding a crowd of striking students, hosting a dinner party, and dealing with fussy guests--and offers useful advice for both neophytes and connoisseurs. Published in 1988, this famous book, halfway between memories and recipes, is a tribute to the small pleasures of cooking and the joy of sharing a table, a true literary feast that has conquered several generations of readers. Close and honest, Colwin speaks to us as she would a good friend and invites us to live our relationship with the kitchen with curiosity, generosity and optimism.

Una Escritora En La Cocina

Another Marvelous Thing

Happy All the Time (Vintage Contemporaries)

'No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.' Weaving together memories, recipes, and wild tales of years spent in the kitchen, Home Cooking is Laurie Colwin's manifesto on the joys of sharing food and entertaining. From the humble hot-plate of her one-room apartment to the crowded kitchens of bustling parties, Colwin regales us with tales of meals gone both magnificently well and disastrously wrong. Never before published in the UK, this is hilarious, personal and full of Colwin's hard-won expertise. Home Cooking will speak to the heart (and stomach) of any amateur cook, professional chef, or food lover.

Within these fourteen hilarious and insightful tales of urban life, you'll meet: Raiford Phelps, an ornithologist who discovers new patterns of animal behavior when he meets Mary Leibnitz. Benno Morna, a temporary bachelor, free to indulge in TV, junk food, and Greenie Frenzel when his wholesome wife is out of town. Vincent Cadworthy and Guido Morris, whose elegant friendship is suddenly disrupted by Misty Berkowitz. Elizabeth Bayard, whose passion for order and civility does constant battle with her unruly loves. They are buffeted by the pressures of their jobs, imposed upon by their families and their surroundings, and remain ever hopeful of making sense of their lives. With compassion and biting wit, Laurie Colwin has created a new sort of comedy of manners. 'Colwin is ingenious, comedic and spirited' Boston Globe 'Colwin has single-handedly revitalized the short story' Los Angeles Times

Passion and Affect

Felici tutti i giorni

Weaving together memories, recipes, and wild tales of years spent in the kitchen, the acclaimed author of Happy All the Time delivers a beloved cookbook manifesto on the joys of sharing food and entertaining. • With a foreword by Ruth Reichl. “As much memoir as cookbook and as much about eating as cooking.” —The New York Times Book Review From the humble hotplate of her one-room apartment to the crowded kitchens of bustling parties, Colwin regales us with tales of meals gone both magnificently well and disastrously wrong. Hilarious, personal, and full of Colwin’s hard-won expertise, Home Cooking will speak to the heart of any amateur cook, professional chef, or food lover.

This delightful comedy of manners and morals is about romantic friendship, romantic marriage, and romantic love--about four people who are good-hearted and sane, lucky and gifted, and who find one another. Knowing that happiness is an art form that requires energy, discipline, and talent, Guido, Holly, Vincnt, and Misty deal with jealousy, estrangement, and other perils involved in the search for love. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A witty modern-day classic about two unique couples discovering universal truths about love and marriage from “a wise, bighearted writer” (The Washington Post). Guido Morris and Vincent Cardworthy are third cousins and best friends. In college they dreamed of writing poetry (Guido) and winning the Nobel Prize in Physics (Vincent). Now in their late twenties, they are together again in Cambridge and on the verge of settling down to more prosaic pursuits. Vincent is headed to New York City to become the Board of City Planning’s expert on garbage, while Guido is preparing to take over the management of his family’s foundation. What they really want to know, however, is who their wives will be. Guido gets the first inkling of his romantic future when he spies a girl with the blackest, sleekest hair he has ever seen sitting on a bench at the Fogg Museum. When he tries to flirt with her, Holly Sturgis makes a cutting remark and leaves. For Guido, it is love at first sight. Vincent discovers Misty Berkowitz one morning at work. Stirring her coffee with a fountain pen, she tells him to get the hell away from her. Soon, cheerful, open-minded Vincent can’t stop thinking about his bored, misanthropic, and very pretty colleague. Guido, Holly, Vincent, and Misty are lucky enough to find love. The question is, are they smart enough to hold on to it? From the terrifying uncertainty of courtship to the dull contentment of marriage, Happy All the Time is a dazzling tribute to the hard work and real courage it takes to create a storybook romance. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Laurie Colwin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

A Novel

Josephine "Billy" Delielle and Francis Clemens are happily married--just not to each other. Another Marvelous Thing is the story of their affair, from its fabulous inception to its inevitable end. Billy and Francis couldn't be more different, at least when it comes to age and disposition, but that doesn't prevent them from falling in love and settling into the easy rhythms of romance--phone calls every morning, rendezvous every weekday afternoon, the odd out-of-town escape--despite both still being very partial to their spouses. In interconnected stories, Laurie Colwin deftly reveals each character's point of view and examines, in razor-sharp detail, the "marvelous" and messy glory of modern love and the curious desires of the heart. This whirlwind romance, perfectly captured in Colwinesque frank and funny style, is firm proof that oppositesreally do attract.

Polly is a happy wife and mother from a remarkably strong and attractive family -- until one day she finds herself entangled in a completely unexpected, sweet, yet painful, love affair with a painter named Lincoln Bennett. All of Polly's beliefs about herself explode, uprooting what had seemed to be a settled -- and everlasting -- idea of family happiness.

Laurie Colwin

Books

Your next favorite book is out there