Hortense Calisher - novels, short stories, memoirs

Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.

EXTREME MAGIC
Extreme Magic is Hortense Calisher’s third collection of shorter works, after In the Absence of Angels (1951) and Tale for the Mirror (1962). Follow a drifting husband as he returns home and finds middle age in “A Christmas Carillon.” Listen with a daughter as she overhears a painful argument between her parents in “The Gulf Between.” Travel with a broken man as he heals after a tragic loss in “Extreme Magic.” Once again, Calisher captivates with her expressionistic prose and intricate characters.

COLLECTED STORIES
The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher gathers short pieces that chart the author’s best-loved themes of mindful consciousness and social worlds. This collection includes one of her well-known New Yorker stories, “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks,” in which a young man drops his mother off at a sanitarium and acquires a new friend who finally awakens him to the world. Also included are “The Sound of Waiting,” one of the chapters in the Elkin family saga; the chilling, Jamesian “The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street,” in which a New York widow hears a scream late one night but cannot decide how to investigate without appearing to her neighbors to have gone mad; and the nearly novella-length “The Summer Rebellion.”

FALSE ENTRY
Pierre Goodman enjoys an idyllic childhood as the son of a widowed dressmaker in post–World War I England. But paradise is ripped from him at age ten when he and his mother immigrate to a small town in Alabama. Yearning to regain peace within his own mind and aided by his photographic memory, he begins falsely but completely enveloping himself in the lives of others. He yearns to become not merely a listener to the world, but also a singer in its chorus. In doing so, Pierre’s life becomes an extraordinary document of his time and place as he finds himself a part of history over and over again. He testifies against the Klan in the Deep South, joins the navy during World War II, experiences love, and eventually finds his way back to England as an entirely changed man.

JOURNAL FROM ELLIPSIA
A genderless alien from Ellipsia, a planet whose inhabitants have no concept of individuality, comes to Earth on an intergalactic exchange program to learn how to become human. To live here, the traveler must study and understand our inclinations for seeing people as distinct beings—the nature of gender, and at the heart of identity, the word I. At once funny and serious, Journal from Ellipsia offers a starkly objective view on our own humanity.

THE RAILWAY POLICE and THE LAST TROLLEY RIDE
The characters in these two novellas take introspective, poignant excursions both to where they want to be (The Railway Police) and where they have been (The Last Trolley Ride). In the first, a woman with hereditary premature baldness decides to embrace her unadorned head and hopes to start a fresh life without attachments to the trappings of days gone by. In the second, an elderly man with a working replica of a trolley line in his basement reminisces about the fateful last ride he took on that very line many years ago. In both stories, Calisher probes the characters’ senses of isolation from their respective worlds.

THE BOBBY-SOXER
Famous playwright Craig Towle has decided to return to his New Jersey hometown, a suburb of New York City. He arrives with his world-renowned reputation and a new wife who is half his age. It is the 1950s, and the new couple raises plenty of eyebrows—in particular, those of the narrator, an adolescent girl who is full of observations, but not judgments. At the center of this layered novel is the narrator’s unconventional family and their odd fixation on Towle, which goes beyond his mere celebrity. The secrets of their past and the potential involvement of Towle in the family’s lineage intertwine in a potentially devastating turn.

EAGLE EYE
Returning home to New York from Europe on his twenty-first birthday, draft-dodging narrator Bunty Bronstein is frustrated with his increasingly pompous businessman father and his disaffected mother, who no longer shows the flame she once possessed. Equipped with an incisive view of bourgeois lifestyles in New York, Bunty observes the shifting sensibilities of his family members, and yet has difficulty apprehending his own place in the world. Preoccupied with emerging computer technology, yet unsure of his future and alienated from his once-comfortable family, Bunty remains a compelling, wandering soul. A male companion piece to Hortense Calisher’s equally expert yet campier Queenie, Eagle Eye explores the mind of a relatable young man facing dilemmas that are at once universal and singular.

HERSELF: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORK
Although Hortense Calisher’s fiction often draws on autobiographical elements, Herself is a disciplined documentation of the award-winning author’s life and work. She surveys the various decades and landscapes she has inhabited, mining her family’s Jewish lineage, discussing her children, exploring her greatest artistic influences, and describing her work process in a brave and bold work of autobiography. Herself is a rich collage of essays, reviews, recollections, and observations that unite the writer and the person.

IN THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS
In this captivating collection of fifteen short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker, Hortense Calisher’s lyrical prose captures the quotidian lives of individuals dealing with alienation, loneliness, and assimilation. Highly influenced by her own New York upbringing, Calisher brings an all-knowing and compassionate verve to these intimate stories. The opening piece, “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks,” is an elegantly constructed tale of a man who becomes particularly introspective after dropping his loving but alcoholic mother off at a sanitarium. In “Heartburn,” Calisher deftly sketches a time and place through portraits of watering holes that resemble their own camaraderie-filled communities. The unforgettable title story captures the end of a love affair.
With her distinctive language and psychological clarity, Calisher meticulously builds truths through her characters and their understandings.

THE NEW YORKERS
Opening in 1943 and spanning over a decade, The New Yorkers is Hortense Calisher’s most ambitious novel. Judge Simon Mannix, a well-educated upper-middle-class New Yorker, is faced with a terrible decision when his unfaithful wife is accidentally shot and killed by their twelve-year-old daughter. Mannix insists upon keeping the truth a secret, claiming that the death was a suicide, as he attempts to save his child from a life of psychological trauma. Shame accumulates in his consciousness, and Mannix finds himself obsessed with the nuances of guilt. Calisher weaves a complex tapestry of closely observed human behaviors and emotions, accentuated by a collection of fragmented portraits of the lives that intersect with those of the judge and his daughter.

ON KEEPING WOMEN
Lexie, a married woman with four children, undergoes a midlife crisis and questions her role as wife, mother, and lover. From within a Victorian house in the Hudson River Valley, Lexie dissects her life experiences in hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of her unhappiness. Through rich symbolism, lively dialogue, and acute commentary, Hortense Calisher conjures a cohesive map of Lexie’s personal awakening.

STANDARD DREAMING
Dr. Niels Berners—a Swiss plastic surgeon living in New York—is struggling to recover from his dysfunctional son’s abandonment of him. He joins a group of four other parents, all with absent children either in jail or in jeopardy, to discuss their feelings and seek a sense of community, comfort, and closure. Hortense Calisher artfully strings together tales of healing, brilliantly tracing the shadow of the generational gap. With compassion and precision, she paints the bruised egos of concerned parents confronting very empty nests.

TALE FOR THE MIRROR
A novella plus twelve short vignettes, Tale for the Mirror demonstrates Hortense Calisher’s masterful use of language in an exploration of the human condition. In the title novella, a suburban man in the Hudson River Valley analyzes his life and discovers the importance of stories after a sage Indian mystic moves into his neighborhood.

Laced with wit and pathos, the evocative shorter pieces include the galvanizing “The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street,” a textured tale of a widow who overhears an incident outside her window, compelling her to solve a mystery while coming to terms with her own loneliness in an unsentimental city. “The Rehabilitation of Ginevra Leake” is the farcical story of a homely girl from a proper Southern family who finds a home in the Communist party. In “The Seacoast of Bohemia,” a successful Manhattan man comes to terms with the fact that he’ll never have children.

TEXTURES OF LIFE
Hortense Calisher’s second novel is a multigenerational story of art, family, and marriage. Opening with Liz and David’s wedding and chronicling the first four years of their life together, Calisher follows the couple through their evolution into erudite, antimaterialist artists. They move into a sparse downtown Manhattan loft, prideful of their rebellious choice to lead lives unfettered by possessions. As time passes, they realize that their unbridled optimism is slowly being abraded by the disappointments of reality. With the ambiguously pleasant news that Elizabeth’s mother and David’s father, both widowed, are finding new love together, Calisher further explores the couple’s interplay and draws piercing parallels between the idealism of youth and the sagacity of old age. Textures of Life explores the nature of relationships and the shifts—both minute and seismic—that affect the power dynamics as Liz and David constantly redefine their roles and opinions in order to sustain their relationship.

QUEENIE
Set in 1960s New York, this piquant coming-of-age story concerns a teenage girl, Queenie, raised to become a “kept woman” in an exceedingly comfortable and well-adjusted—yet insular and retrograde—household. After enrolling in college, Queenie confronts new understandings, both personal and political, and gradually becomes cognizant of the dated values imparted upon her. Bringing her trademark stylishness and a remarkable exuberance to Queenie, Hortense Calisher simultaneously pays homage to and updates the Victorian storytelling approach in capturing the intellectual and sexual breakthroughs of a contemporary young woman.

IN THE SLAMMER WITH CAROL SMITH
After spending two decades in jails, psych wards, and halfway houses for her peripheral involvement in a radical
students’ bombing plot, thirty-six-year-old Carol Smith winds up squatting in a tattered space in Spanish Harlem. She
spends the majority of her vagrant days socializing with her homeless neighbors, arguing with a testy social worker, and
wandering the streets with Alphonse, a wayward South African wino and self-professed actor. Alphonse proves to be an
inspiring force, and soon Carol is weaning herself off antidepressants as the sifting of her memories—mostly of her
upbringing by two aunts in Massachusetts—creates a chance for redemption.

KISSING COUSINS: A MEMORY
Kissing Cousins recalls the author as a teenager: peppy, earnest, and a bit self-important. Hortense Calisher documents her family’s surprising history as Southern Jews adrift in New York. Finding her new city and school boorish, the young Calisher takes solace in the enduring friendship she develops with Katie Pyle, a gregarious nurse turned “kissing cousin” fifteen years Calisher’s senior. Katie, an unmarried woman, possesses her own secret, depicted here with a novelist’s touch for the dramatic. Kissing Cousins tackles matters of aging, life, and death with the sensitivity and eloquence readers have come to expect from Hortense Calisher.

MYSTERIES OF MOTION
The Citizen Courier is headed toward Island US, “the first public habitat in space.” Aboard the ship resides a collection of diverse travelers. Narrator Tom Gilpin is a rich publisher, and he’s joined by fellow journalist Veronica, as well as an industrialist, a Jewish-German expatriate philosopher, a diplomat and his wife, and the teenage son of a NASA admiral. Revealing a complex, nonlinear narrative for each of its characters, the iridescent literary sci-fi of Mysteries of Motion captures lives and relationships as labyrinthine as the space vessel that carries them, channeling intergalactic, philosophical, and psychological voyages.

AGE: A LOVE STORY
Rupert and Gemma, an elderly couple still very much in love, know that death will inevitably come for one of them before taking the other, so they keep private journals to ensure that the survivor’s mate will never truly be gone, living on instead through his or her words. Age is the narrative of Rupert and Gemma’s lives: their similarities, their differences, and the ways in which the two are irreversibly entwined. Each writes of life’s mundane events—social outings, errands, a quiet night at home—that assume wistful meaning when viewed through the lens of memory.