Minnesota, 1911. Nilda Carlson is torn between life in the city of Blackduck and spending time with her family back home on the farm. Her employer, Mrs. Schoenleber, gives her more and more responsibility and experience. Still new to America herself, Nilda focuses on the area's immigrant community, but she'll have to fight to get her ideas accepted by the locals and donors alike. One of her greatest joys is her weekly piano lesson with Fritz Larsson....

"On a clear July day in 1899, the salty ocean breeze along Bellevue Avenue carries new smells of gasoline and exhaust as Emma, now editor-in-chief of the Newport Messenger, covers Newport's first-ever automobile parade. But the festive atmosphere soon turns to shock as young Philip King drunkenly swerves his motorcar into a wooden figure of a nanny pushing a pram on the obstacle course. That evening, at a dinner party hosted by Ella King at her magnificent...

"Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sunbleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha's Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their 'real lives': Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband,...

The American Revolution is finally over, and Sophie Menzies is starved for good news. When her nearest neighbor, General Seamus Ogilvy, finally comes home to Tall Acre, she hopes it is a sign of better days to come. But the general is now a widower with a small daughter in desperate need of a mother. Nearly destitute, Sophie agrees to marry Seamus and become the mistress of Tall Acre in what seems a safe, sensible arrangement. But when a woman from...

From the chaos of Ellis Island to the melting pot of industrial Detroit, young Jane finds herself navigating not just a new language and country, but a world poised upon the edge of economic and social revolution--and war.

A collection of short fiction explores the lives of a variety of characters, including a jaded Hollywood filmmaker, a precocious fifth-grader watching his parents' marriage disintegrate, and a child forced into a harrowing cross-country escape.

In the title story a Los Angeles Young Republican relates, with strangely hilarious affectlessness, his night out at a Keith Jarrett concert with is terminmally nihilistic punk friends Gimlet, Cheese, and Big, In "My Appearance" a very famous actresss frets and schemes how to avoid being made the butt of a late-night talk-show host's notoriously slippery jokes, while :Little Expressionless Animals" gives us a three-year streak on a game show, finally...

Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Swimmer," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life."

A Jewish girl's adolescent years on Long Island are described in a collection of stories. In one, her father remarries, in a second her brother drops out of university, in a third her mother dies of cancer.

Twelve stories on human relations. In Charades, a traditional family game on Christmas turns sour when the charades hit too close to home, while in Agnes of Iowa, a woman's ambition to be worldly remains unfulfilled by an encounter with a poet from Africa.