Alison Lurie

In this “excellent” novel of “rare understanding” from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, culture shock consumes a young Harvard couple in Los Angeles (The New York Times).
 
When his mentor at Harvard University suddenly leaves for Washington, Paul Cattleman finds himself adrift in the wilds of academia. After losing his fellowship, he is out of work and one thesis short of a PhD....

Offers a meditation on architecture and how it speaks to human experience, looking at what buildings and the spaces they contain say about the people who inhabit them, as well as the effects that those spaces have on them.

When a wife reaches her breaking point and her husband begins an ill-advised affair, civil war breaks out within their family Erica Tate wouldn't mind getting up in the morning if she enjoyed her children more. Until puberty struck, Jeffrey and Matilda were absolute darlings, but in the last year, they have become sullen, insufferable little monsters. Erica's husband, Brian, is so deeply immersed in university life-and the legs of a half-literate...

"In this candid and bluntly humorous collection of essays on a wide range of topics, Lurie begins with a portrait of her life at Radcliffe during World War II when the smartest women in the country were treated like second-class citizens, the most scholarly among them expected to work in factories to support the war effort. She moves on to her unheralded, clumsy attempts and near failure to be a writer and, finally having reached a level of recognition,...