Elizabeth Strout

As a panicked world goes into lockdown in March 2020, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. She expected to be back in a week or two. Weeks turn into months, and it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. "With her trademark spare, crystalline prose--a voice infused...

Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of the author's 2016 novel My name is...

Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan -- the...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton comes a “deeply moving” (The Washington Post) novel that “confirms Strout as the possessor of an irresistibly companionable, peculiarly American voice” (The Atlantic Monthly).
“Superb . . . a shimmering tale of loss, faith, and human fallibility.”—O:...

"With her 'extraordinary capacity for radical empathy' (The Boston Globe), remarkable insight into the human condition, and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst; fall in love and yet choose to be apart; and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it: What does anyone's life mean? It's autumn in Maine, and...

“As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,” writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. “It’s the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.” The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive...

A contemporary of Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Frederick Busch was a master craftsman of the form; his subjects were single-event moments in so-called ordinary life. The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are tales of families trying to heal their wounds, save their marriages, and rescue their children. In "Ralph the Duck," a security guard struggles to hang on to his marriage. In "Name the Name," a traveling...

"In time for the one-year anniversary of the Trump Inauguration and the Women's March, this provocative, unprecedented anthology features original short stories from thirty bestselling and award-winning authors--including Alice Walker, Richard Russo, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Mary Higgins Clark, and Lee Child--with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen"-- This provocative,...

One of the Middle East's most celebrated writers, Rabih Alameddine, discusses his novel An Unnecessary Woman, an intimate and moving portrait of a reclusive book-loving 72-year-old Lebanese woman who views her complicated past through the lens of her favorite works of literature. In conversation with Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge). Mia Dillon will read an excerpt.