Jill Bialosky

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Ohio

A Memoir

From a critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author and poet comes "a delightfully hybrid book: part anthology, part critical study, part autobiography" (Chicago Tribune) that is organized around fifty-one remarkable poems by poets such as Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath.

For Jill Bialosky, certain poems stand out like signposts at pivotal moments in a life: the death of a father, adolescence, first love, leaving home, the suicide of a sister, marriage, the birth of a child, the day in New York City the Twin Towers fell. As Bialosky narrates these moments, she illuminates the ways in which particular poems offered insight, compassion, and connection, and shows how poetry can be a blueprint for living. In Poetry Will Save Your Life, Bialosky recalls when she encountered each formative poem, and how its importance and meaning evolved over time, allowing new insights and perceptions to emerge.

While Bialosky's personal stories animate each poem, they touch on many universal experiences, from the awkwardness of girlhood, to crises of faith and identity, from braving a new life in a foreign city to enduring the loss of a loved one, from becoming a parent to growing creatively as a poet and artist. Each moment and poem illustrate "not only how to read poetry, but also how to love poetry" (Christian Science Monitor).

"An emotional, sometimes-wrenching account of how lines of poetry can be lifelines" (Kirkus Reviews), Poetry Will Save Your Life is an engaging and entirely original examination of a life while celebrating the enduring value of poetry, not as a purely cerebral activity, but as a means of conveying personal experience and as a source of comfort and intimacy. In doing so the book brilliantly illustrates the ways in which poetry can be an integral part of life itself and can, in fact, save your life.

Poetry Will Save Your Life

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Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize
An explosive tale of art and myth, desire and betrayal, from New York Times bestselling author Jill Bialosky

Something terrible has happened and I don't know what to do. An unnamed narrator's life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys' prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum's austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft. As secret betrayals and deceptions come to light and rage threatens to overwhelm her, the pantheon of gods assume remarkably vivid lives of their own, forcing her to choose between reality and myth in an effort to free herself from the patriarchal constraints of the past and embrace a new vision for her future.

The Deceptions is a page-turning and seductively told exploration of female sexuality and ambition as well as a human drama that dares to test the stories we tell ourselves. It is also a brilliant investigation of a life caught between the dueling magnetic poles of privacy and its appropriation in art and literature. Celebrated poet, memoirist, and novelist Jill Bialosky has reached new and daring heights in her boldest work yet.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Delaware

A Novel

An explosive tale of art and myth, desire and betrayal, from New York Times best-selling author Jill Bialosky

Something terrible has happened and I don't know what to do. An unnamed narrator's life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys' prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum's austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft. As secret betrayals and deceptions come to light and rage threatens to overwhelm her, the pantheon of gods assume remarkably vivid lives of their own, forcing her to choose between reality and myth in an effort to free herself from the patriarchal constraints of the past and embrace a new vision for her future.
 
The Deceptions is a page-turning and seductively told exploration of female sexuality and ambition as well as a human drama that dares to test the stories we tell ourselves. It is also a brilliant investigation of a life caught between the dueling magnetic poles of privacy and its appropriation in art and literature. Celebrated poet, memoirist, and novelist Jill Bialosky has reached new and daring heights in her boldest work yet.

The Deceptions

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Utah

Edward Darby has everything a man could hope for: meaningful work, a loving wife, and a beloved daughter. With a rising career as a partner at an esteemed gallery, he strives not to let ambition, money, power, and his dark past corrode the sanctuary of his domestic and private life. Influenced by his father, a brilliant Romantics scholar, Edward has always been more of a purist than an opportunist. But when a celebrated artist controlled by her insecurities betrays him, and another very different artist awakens his heart and stirs up secrets from his past, Edward will find himself unmoored from his marriage, his work, and the memory of his beloved father. And when the finalist of an important prize are announced, and the desperate artists maneuver to seek its validation, Edward soon learns that betrayal comes in many forms, and that he may be hurtling toward an act that challenges his own notions about what comprises a life worth living. A compelling odyssey of a man unhinged by his ideals, The Prize is also an unflinching portrait of a marriage struggling against the corroding tide of time and the proximity to the treacherous fault line between art and money.

The Prize

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West Virginia

A novel by an acclaimed American poet, House Under Snow is a story of mothers and daughters, of sexual identity, of a family slowly disintegrating after the premature death of its patriarch. Anna Crane, soon to be married, reflects back on her childhood in Ohio during the 1960s and '70s with her two sisters and her charismatic, self-destructing mother. Evoking the claustrophobia of small-town life, Anna's first passionate love affair with a troubled boy who works as a groom and trainer at a horse track, and her mother's endless stream of suitors and a failed marriage, the novel races toward a chilling conclusion when Anna is betrayed by the two most important figures in her young life.

Not since Alice McDermott's That Night has there been such a telling portrait of first love. And not since Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here have we witnessed the destructive, seductive nature of a mother who insists on competing with her children. An unforgettable tale of the power and vulnerability of sex and family, history and the past, House Under Snow is a lyrical and brilliant fictional debut.

House under Snow

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Connecticut

Eleanor Cahn, a professor of literature, wife of a preeminent surgeon, and devoted mother of two, is in Paris to present a paper on Anna Karenina. A chance encounter brings to the surface passions she has suppressed for years. As The Life Room unfolds, we learn the secrets of her erotic past: ethereal William, her high school boyfriend; her role as muse to troubled painter Adam; her marriage to loyal, steady Michael. On her return to New York, Eleanor's charged attraction to another man takes on a life of its own, threatening to destroy everything she has.  Jill Bialosky has created a fresh, piercingly real heroine who must choose between responsibility and desire. 

The Life Room

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Michigan

My Sister's Unfinished Life

In this New York Times bestseller, Jill Bialosky, poet and author, undergoes "a profound and lyrical investigation" (New York magazine) as she attempts to understand the events and emotional state that led her sister to commit suicide and the impact of her death on family and loved ones.

On April 15, 1990, Kim, Jill Bialosky's younger sister, arrived home from a bar after a fight with her boyfriend. She took her mother's keys, went into the closed garage, and turned on the ignition. Her body was discovered the next morning by a neighborhood boy.

For decades, Bialosky has grappled with the guilt, questions, and devastation that was unloosed by Kim's suicide. Now, in this remarkable memoir, she attempts to reconstruct the complex inner life of her sister and in doing so, unlocks the nature of suicide itself and how we are each deeply affected by it.

In the course of trying to understand what drove her sister that night, Bialosky examines some of the most fundamental questions of human nature--why some of us more emotionally stable than others, even when raised in the same circumstances; how the unconscious shape our identities; what the difference is between depression and suicidal feelings; and why we sometimes fail to love and protect one another.

Combining Kim's own personal writings with family history, medical reportage, literary criticism, and research, Bialosky has crafted "an extraordinarily valiant and resonant testimony to the healing powers of truth and empathy" (Booklist).

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Jill Bialosky

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Jill Bialosky

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Jill Bialosky

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Jill Bialosky

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Jill Bialosky

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Jill Bialosky

History of a Suicide

Jill Bialosky

The Deceptions