Meredith Sue Willis turns her considerable talents to explore a new part of the world: the downtrodden New Jersey waterfront undergoing a radical Gold Coast transformation. In LOVE PALACE Willis has created a memorable cast of characters and a pitch perfect sense of place. The tale of a quixotic battle against redevelopment is narrated by an unlikely heroine. Martha Miller is neurotic, over-educated, under-achieving, over-libidoed, and in a tailspin over being left by Rotter number 3, her ...

Willis's first book about the Second-World, The City Built of Starships, tells earthlings who crossed interstellar space to colonize "the planet with two suns" and start a new civilization. Colonization does not go well. The First-World emigrants had already divided into the rulers and the ruled even before landing on the Second World. When the new planet failed to provide sufficient food, tensions erupted into civil war.Soledad in the Desert offers the vivid, often terrifying back...

The short stories in Meredith Sue Willis' Re-visons: Stories from Stories will take you back to your Scripture, your Shakespeare and your Harriet Beecher Stowe. And when you do glance back at the stories that Willis here "re-visions," you might be surprised at the way in which women figure in these well-known works from an earlier time-- barely. You may also be surprised to discover that you have read many of the texts she uses, rolling happily along on a tide of male-centricity, never giv...

When Meredith Sue Willis's first novel, which tells the story of a troubled preacher's family in West Virginia, first came out in 1979, it was declared a cause for celebration by the Los Angeles Times. Comparing Willis to Anne Tyler, the Times wrote: "She has written with depth and honesty about a life style available to many of us only though books." A Space Apart, according to The Philadelphia Bulletin, "weaves a web of subtle suspense and poetic perception." Now the electronic re-issue ...

Fourteen-year-old Melisandre Rossi lives in New York City with her mother. Meli, a self-identified weird teenager, far prefers exploring the museum to attending classes at her upscale private academy. Increasingly bored, she convinces her mother to let her transfer to an alternative public high school, where she can study ancient Chinese ceramics and interact with students even weirder than she is.Yet life grows more complicated, not less so, when she makes this transition. At home...

In Dwight's House and Other Stories, Meredith Sue Willis's eclecticism and layered prose release us from the moorings of "regional fiction." Written by a prize-winning member of the Appalachian Renaissance in literature, Dwight's House & Other Stories is an anthology of short stories focusing on believeable characters put in paralyzing dilemmas. These tales examine the troubling paradoxes of the human condition with sympathy and synchronicityWillis breaks out of the narrow borders ...

Oradell Greengold, the brassy narrator of Meredith Sue Willis' Oradell at Sea, spends her days and her deceased husband's fortune cruising on first-class luxury liners where young Greek deckhands wait on her hand and foot-rub. Oradell is a modern-day Mae West who unapologetically enjoys her wealth, yet still has a soft spot for her mine organizer first love. Novelist Meredith Sue Willis charts the psychological course of this elderly woman facing the end of her life with unfinished busines...

Higher Ground, the first novel of the Blair Morgan trilogy, was first published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1981 and remains in print. The trilogy examines small town life and social movements of the 1960's through the lens of Blair Ellen Morgan's coming-of-age. Blair Ellen attends the high school where her parents teach, and her adolescence is richly realized in the complexities of relationships begun when she was 11, with a family of hill-country people who were her aunt's neighbors. B...

By the time the colonists landed on the planet with two suns, they had already divided into the rulers and the ruled. When the new world failed to provide sufficient food, this division erupted into civil war. Some people fled to the desert, others stayed on the coast and built a city from the hulks of the starships.Having learned from her mother how to make native plants edible and how to train the great flying beasts called yaegers, Espera, the desert girl, takes on a quest from ...

Blair Morgan leaves college to fight poverty following a charismatic, but unconventional religious leader. The familiar conventions of the novel of initiation are made new by a convincing female protagonist and a narrative that uses politics as the setting and vehicle of individual maturation, focusing 1960's youth and political culture through finely cut lenses of race.Moments of personal anguish are at the heart of this novel, and they add up to a complex and convincing portrait o...

In the late nineteen sixties, West Virginia born Blair Morgan moves to New York City, where she works at Bellevue Hospital and is involved in the 1968 anti-war sit-ins at Columbia University. The novel includes scenes of political protest and personal coming of age as well as life on a rehabilitation ward in the old Bellevue Hospital.

Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities.Willis’s stories explore the complex negotiations between longtime natives of the region and its newcomers and the rifts that develop within families over current issues such as mount...