Clock Dance (2018, Alfred A. Knopf) is the 22nd novel published by American author Anne Tyler. [1]
Eleven year old Willa Drake struggles to keep things together in the face of her mother's dramatic and disruptive behavior. As a young woman, she seeks stability in an early marriage, leaving college to build a steady and predictable environment for herself and her family. She must rebuild that life two decades later, after her husband's death. After another 20 years, at 61, Willa leads a comfortable, stylish life in Arizona with her semi-retired second husband, Peter. While she gets along fine in this environment, she finds it all confining and empty. Then one day, a stranger phones from Baltimore, seeking help for a young mother who has been seriously injured; the connection turns out to be that the woman is a former girlfriend of one of Willa's sons, the caller mistakenly assuming Willa is family. With few other commitments, Willa is drawn to fly east, husband in tow; they find Denise, her nine-year-old daughter Cheryl and a dog, Airplane, living in a small house in a rundown but lively Baltimore neighborhood. While she brings stability and support to Denise and Cheryl, Willa also reclaims her younger, freer and less deferential self. [2] [3]
The Accidental Tourist is a 1985 novel by Anne Tyler that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985 and the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986. The novel was adapted into a 1988 award-winning film starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and Geena Davis, for which Davis won an Academy Award.
Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-three novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail", her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language."
Back When We Were Grownups is a 2001 novel written by Anne Tyler in memory of her husband, who died in 1997.
My Ántonia is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, considered one of her best works.
Madea's Class Reunion is a 2003 play, directed, written by, and starring Tyler Perry. The live performance that was released on DVD was taped in Detroit at the Fox Theatre. The play stars David Mann as Leroy Brown, Tamela Mann as Cora and Chandra Currelley as Emma.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a 1982 novel by Anne Tyler, set in Baltimore, Maryland. It is Tyler's ninth novel. In 1983 it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Tyler considers it her best work.
O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by American author Willa Cather, written while she was living in New York. It was her second published novel. The title is a reference to a poem by Walt Whitman entitled "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" from Leaves of Grass (1855).
The Clock Winder is a 1972 novel by Anne Tyler.
One of Ours is a 1922 novel by Willa Cather that won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native in the first decades of the 20th century. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, he is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise.
Digging to America, published by Knopf in May 2006, is American author Anne Tyler's seventeenth novel.
The Burglar's Christmas is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in Home Monthly in 1896 under the pseudonym of Elizabeth L. Seymour, her cousin's name.
My Mortal Enemy is the eighth novel by American author Willa Cather. It was first published in 1926.
Denise Robins was a prolific English romantic novelist and the first President of the Romantic Novelists' Association (1960–1966). She wrote under her first married name and under the pen-names: Denise Chesterton, Eve Vaill, 'Anne Llewellyn', Hervey Hamilton, Francesca Wright, Ashley French, Harriet Gray and Julia Kane, producing short stories, plays, and about 170 Gothic romance novels. In 1965, Robins published her autobiography, Stranger Than Fiction. At the time of her death in 1985, Robins's books had been translated into fifteen languages and had sold more than one hundred million copies. In 1984, they were borrowed more than one and a half million times from British libraries.
Olive Kitteridge (2008) is a novel by American author Elizabeth Strout. The novel provides a portrait of the title character and a number of recurring characters in the coastal town of Crosby, Maine. It takes the form of 13 short stories that are interrelated but discontinuous in terms of narrative.
Noah's Compass is a novel by Anne Tyler first published in 2009 about a solitary 60-year-old man trying to come to terms with his own life. Critics agree that in this, Tyler's 18th novel, the author again treads familiar territory by setting her novel in Baltimore and by following the life of an inconspicuous man who has never realised his full potential.
Jolene is a 2008 American drama film directed by Dan Ireland, based on the short story "Jolene: A Life" by E. L. Doctorow. It marked Jessica Chastain's film debut. It premiered on June 13, 2008 at the Seattle International Film Festival and was later released in the United States on October 29, 2010.
Sapphira and the Slave Girl is Willa Cather's last novel, published in 1940. It is the story of Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, a bitter white woman, who becomes irrationally jealous of Nancy, a beautiful young slave. The book balances an atmospheric portrait of antebellum Virginia against an unblinking view of the lives of Sapphira's slaves.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is a novel by Marguerite Young. She has described it as "an exploration of the illusions, hallucinations, errors of judgment in individual lives, the central scene of the novel being an opium addict's paradise."
The Paynes is an American television sitcom that premiered on January 16, 2018, on the Oprah Winfrey Network. The show was created, written, and directed by Tyler Perry and serves as a sequel to his previous series, Tyler Perry's House of Payne.