Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) is, of course, best known as the author of Little Women (1868). But she was also a noted essayist who wrote on a wide range of subjects, including her father's failed utopian commune, the benefits of an unmarried life, and her experience as a young woman sent to work in service to alleviate her family's poverty. Her first literary success was a contemporary close-up account of the American Civil War, brilliantly depicted in Hospital Sketches drawn from her own...

Some Luck is the first novel in the dazzling Last Hundred Years trilogy from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize Jane Smiley; a literary adventure that will spans a century in America.After his return from the battlefields in France, Walter Langdon and his wife Rosanna begin their life together on a remote farm in Iowa. As time passes, their little family will grow: from Frank, the handsome, wilful first-born, to Joe, whose love of animals and the land sust...

Four acclaimed female authors—including Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley and In the Dream House author Carmen Carmen Maria Machado—reflect on their lifelong engagement with Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel of girlhood and growing up.Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Jane Smiley explore their strong lifelong personal engagement with Alcott’s novel Little Women—what it has meant to them and why i...

In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world’s great literary treasures – as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland a...

The Spring 2024 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”The Spring 2024 Issue, guest-edited by Laila Lalami, features poetry and prose by Mosab Abu Toha, Nathalie Handal, January...

Moral Soundings takes a fresh new approach to introducing students and general readers to contemporary ethics. Rather than surveying the standard fare in a typical anthology format, Furrow collects diversified essays around a structured theme: does Western culture face a moral crisis of values? Prominent voices in the humanities and social sciences provide a range of perspectives on a concentrated set of ethical questions dealing with such topics as family values, the morality of ...

'I raced through this murder mystery' Good Housekeeping, 10 Books to Read Right Now!'Smiley is a masterful writer' Sunday Times'Outstanding. Her sentences are sublime' Roxane GayFrom a brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author: a rollicking murder mystery set in Gold Rush California, as two young prostitutes follow a trail of missing girls.Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husba...

A feminist literary landmark: the daring story of a woman's search for personal freedom that was so controversial in 1899 that it ended its author's career.With an effortless, sure-handed artistry, Kate Chopin tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a young mother and model wife, whose romantic involvement with a young man at a seaside resort allows her for the first time to imagine a freer life. Upon her return to New Orleans, Edna leaves her husband’s home for her ow...

**'Sunshine in book form' – Daily Mail'A joyfully escapist celebration of friendship and freedom' – Mail on Sunday'Delightful, heartwarming . . . An especially welcome reminder of the bright spots even in dark times' – NPRParas is a spirited young racehorse living in a stable in the French countryside. That is until one afternoon when she pushes o...

In At Paradise Gate, Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Jane Smiley paints with searing accuracy a portrait of a marriage at breaking point and one family's struggle for survival.While seventy-seven-year-old Ike Robison is dying in his bedroom upstairs, his wife, Anna, must defend all that they have built together throughout their lengthy marriage as their house is invaded by their three interfering - albeit loving - middle-aged daughters and their twenty-three y...

From the Pulitzer prize winning author of A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley, comes Ordinary Love and Good Will - two thematically linked novellas, both included in this ebook edition, exploring the elusive dream of the perfect family.Ordinary Love gives voice to a mother, loving but unsure of her love's value, who, in leaving her powerful husband, fears that she has done her children irrevocable harm . . .Good Will, by contrast, is t...

It is the morning after the Academy Awards. Max, an award-winning writer and his lover, Elena, are hosts to a house full of guests including their daughter, a movie star, a healer and an agent. Over the course of the next ten life-changing days, they share stories of Hollywood, watch movies and become entangled by the pool. Sparks fly and tension mounts as this unputdownable tale of love, war, sex, politics, friendship and betrayal moves towards its redemptive end.