Shirley Ann Grau

The Keepers of the House

The relationship of Will Howland with Margaret Carmichael, his black housekeeper and mistress, is exposed when their granddaughter marries a segregationist with political ambitions, in a new edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about racism, persecution, and rage. Reprint.

A Novel

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist: A family saga of a wealthy man’s rise and his children’s fight for his fortune in 1920s New Orleans. Like many people in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Thomas Henry Oliver came to the city to escape a dull life—in his case, a childhood in the backwoods of the Midwest. But few New Orleans immigrants find as much prosperity as Oliver does amongst the city’s lively streets, amassing an enormous fortune built from brothels and speakeasies. By the time he’s ninety-five, Oliver has created a dynasty in Storyville, the city’s notorious red-light district, but as his wealth grows, so does his family’s desire to control it. After a series of strokes, Oliver must choose an inheritor, even though his two entitled daughters and ambitious adopted son don’t always seem worthy of his legacy. His first daughter, an introverted perfectionist, marries a greedy, alcoholic, and adulterous Cajun, and his second daughter fosters a secret desire for her brother-in-law. On his deathbed, Thomas learns that the gold that built the Oliver name now corrupts his legacy and threatens to tear his family apart. In this simmering dynastic saga by the author of Keepers of the House, three generations collide in their battle to control an empire. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Shirley Ann Grau, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

The Condor Passes

Julius Caesar

To twenty-year-old Joan Mitchell, her fate seems sealed and strangely inconsequential: inheritance of the stately New Orleans house she shares with her oppressive mother and undermining half-sister, and marriage to an ill-matched steady boyfriend. Then a brief affair with Michael Kern, a man she knows to be a cad but is drawn to anyway, unfurls for Joan a surrealistic sequence of events - pregnancy, an abortion, and eventually withdrawal into a numbed existence. Only her growing obsession with Michael and her cavernous loneliness lend her life direction. An intricate psychological novel that plumbs the pain and rage born of identity and volition suppressed, The House on Coliseum Street is an arresting, somber story that transcends period and place even as it so immediately evokes New Orleans in the late 1950s.

The House on Coliseum Street

Isle aux Chiens, an island at the mouth of the Mississippi, is inhabited by an isolated populace of inbred French and Spanish fishermen who endure the hazards of nature and their own volatile passions.

The Hard Blue Sky

A Black Prince and Other Stories

The Keepers of The House

Mit »Liebe hat viele Namen« schrieb Shirley Ann Grau ein Buch über die Spielarten der Liebe, die unter so vielen Namen auftreten kann, schrieb sie den Roman einer ungewöhnlichen Familie und ihres Schicksals. Das feudale Philadelphia und elegante Londoner Salons um die Jahrhundertwende, eine Farm in Kenia und eine Bergarbeiterstadt in Pennsylvania, die Villen der Reichen am Golf von Mexiko und das moderne Chicago sind der Hintergrund, vor dem Shirley Ann Grau das Porträt der amerikanischen Familie Henley entstehen läßt. Drei Menschen blicken zurück auf ihr Leben, erzählen von ihren wechselseitigen Beziehungen und Verstrickungen, ihren Formen der Liebe.

Roman

Liebe hat viele Namen

This magnificent summation of the short stories of Shirley Ann Grau, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Keepers of the House, gathers together eighteen gems ranking with the finest of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. Grau possesses a range representing a master course in the craft of this most demanding art form. Her reader's banquet offers character sketches of Chekovian poignance and insight, a hilarious love story, excursions into the gothic and hauntingly apocalyptic, the elegiac and experimental, and stories that feel like compressed novels in their lapidary polish, depth, and emotional weight. Grau belongs in the company of the great southern short story writers, and the author's own choices of her best work remind readers of the unmatched capacity of the brief fictional form to depict character epiphany and such timeless themes as redemption and rebirth, the struggle between power and love, and the persistence of the past.

Selected Stories

Poems

I Watched You Disappear

“An arresting and beautifully written novel” about a young woman who yearns to escape her life in Louisiana, by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author (The New York Times). West of New Orleans among a few small Gulf islands lies the Isle aux Chiens, a tiny, impoverished strip of land burdened by intolerable heat and roaming packs of wild dogs. Here a handful of Creole families eke out a meager existence by fishing the Gulf waters. Such is the fate of Al Landry and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Annie. All Annie has ever known is the wild sea, but she longs for other people and places, including the glamor of life in the Big Easy. When a cruel, handsome sailing boat pilot from the city passes through, he kindles Annie’s fantasies for a life beyond the island. Soon, the young girl faces a decision: remain planted in the predictable life she has always known, or toss it all aside for her dreamed-of adventure. Elsewhere on the island, eighteen-year-old Henry Livaudais disappears on a hunting expedition, sparking a feud with a neighboring settlement of Yugoslavian oystermen. As the summer heat intensifies, his father tries to discover why Henry left the isolated fishing settlement. By the author of The Keepers of the House, this novel follows two teenagers on the cusp of adulthood as they look for an escape from their Southern homes. The National Book Award–shortlisted author establishes herself as the master chronicler of bayou life in this debut novel that captures the complexities of the Deep South’s most impoverished corners. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Shirley Ann Grau, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

A “luminescent” collection of stories about nine Southern women from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Keepers of the House (The New York Times). The nine namesake women of this collection come from widely disparate worlds, from isolated bayou towns to New Orleans high society. All, however, struggle with grief, longing, and hope. In “Widows Walk,” Myra Rowland tries to make sense of life after the death of her husband. “In the Beginning” depicts a daughter trying to understand her own mother’s determination to raise her up from abject poverty. “Ending,” meanwhile, tells of a couple whose union dissolves just as their daughter marries. In many cases, these protagonists are struggling to accept the sudden loss of life and love in a land teeming with both. In this unforgettable volume, one of America’s most masterful storytellers writes with an eye for the female experience and the teeming diversity of life in the Deep South. “Grau’s tremendous powers of description, ability to conjure atmosphere, and impeccable prose elevate her to the top tier of American short story stylists” (Booklist). This ebook features an illustrated biography of Shirley Ann Grau, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Stories

Nine Women

National Book Award Finalist: A stunning collection of Southern short fiction by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Keepers of the House. A family hides its poverty behind a façade of gentility. A mysterious stranger sows discord in a backwoods hamlet. A man leaves prison only to be drawn back into the darkness of his past. A young bride faces the choice of informing on her husband and his family or enduring a lifetime of deceit. These nine stories by Pulitzer Prize winner Shirley Ann Grau traverse the landscape of the American South, from New Orleans to the Louisiana bayou to the pine woods of Alabama, but their true territory is universal: the mysteries of the human heart. A dazzling portrait of the lovers and the criminals, the rich and the outcasts of the Deep South, these tales of passion, conflict, and destiny come from “a born writer if ever there was one . . . One reads these haunting, strikingly original stories with pleasure and excitement, enthralled by their power, amused by their melancholy irony” (The New York Times). This ebook features an illustrated biography of Shirley Ann Grau, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Shirley Ann Grau

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