Traces the lives of the Tetherly and Copaken families in the aftermath of a child's tragic death, which results in a broken marriage, a bonding between bereaved siblings and healing in the form of an adopted girl's prodigious violin talent. By the author of the best-selling Bad Mother.

In this moving, wry, and candid novel, widely acclaimed novelist Ayelet Waldman takes us through one woman’s passage through love, loss, and the strange absurdities of modern life.Emilia Greenleaf believed that she had found her soulmate, the man she was meant to spend her life with. But life seems a lot less rosy when Emilia has to deal with the most neurotic and sheltered five-year-old in New York City: her new stepson William. Now Emilia finds herself trying to flag down taxis with a giant, industrial-strength car seat, looking for perfect, strawberry-flavored, lactose-free cupcakes, receiving corrections on her French pronunciation from her supercilious stepson – and attempting to find balance in a new family that’s both larger, and smaller, than she bargained for. In Love and Other Impossible Pursuits Ayelet Waldman has created a novel rich with humor and truth, perfectly characterizing one woman’s search for answers in a crazily uncertain world.

A spellbinding new novel of contraband masterpieces, tragic love, and the unexpected legacies of forgotten crimes, Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure weaves a tale around the fascinating, true history of the Hungarian Gold Train in the Second World War. In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure—a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust. Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie Stein, and charges her with searching for an unknown woman—a woman whose portrait and fate come to haunt Natalie, a woman whose secret may help Natalie to understand the guilt her grandfather will take to his grave and to find a way out of the mess she has made of her own life. A story of brilliantly drawn characters—a suave and shady art historian, a delusive and infatuated Freudian, a family of singing circus dwarfs fallen into the clutches of Josef Mengele, and desperate lovers facing choices that will tear them apart—Love and Treasure is Ayelet Waldman’s finest novel to date: a sad, funny, richly detailed work that poses hard questions about the value of precious things in a time when life itself has no value, and about the slenderest of chains that can bind us to the griefs and passions of the past. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

A healing antidote to our divisive culture, full of evocative storytelling, spiritual wisdom, and nine essential daily practices—by the first female, Black senior minister at the historic Collegiate Churches of New York “Fierce Love teaches us that with spiritual faith we can transcend the darkest moments and come through stronger.”—Gabrielle Bernstein, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Universe Has Your Back We are living in a world divided. Race and ethnicity, caste and color, gender and sexuality, class and education, religion and political party have all become demographic labels that reduce our differences to simplistic categories in which “we” are vehemently against “them.” But Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis’s own experience—of being the first female and first Black minister in her church’s history, of being in an interracial marriage, and of making peace with childhood abuse—illustrates that our human capacity for empathy and forgiveness is the key to reversing these ugly trends. Inspired by the tenets of ubuntu—the Zulu philosophy that we are each impacted by the circumstances that impact those around us, and that the world won’t get better until we all get better—Fierce Love lays out the nine daily practices for breaking through tribalism and engineering the change we seek. From downsizing our emotional baggage to speaking truth to power to fueling our activism with joy, it demonstrates the power of small, morally courageous steps to heal our own lives, our posse, and our larger communities. Sharing stories that trace her personal reckoning with racism as well as the arc of her journey to an inclusive and service-driven faith, Dr. Lewis shows that kindness, compassion, and inclusive thinking are muscles that can be exercised and strengthened. With the goal of mending our inextricable human connection, Fierce Love is a manifesto for all generations: a bighearted, healing antidote to our rancorous culture.

Red Hook Stories is a collection of 20 short stories and 20 photographs that grasp the desperate beauty of human loss and resiliency in the empty dockyard neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn between the years of 1981 and 1992. Woven throughout the collection are a mix of voices rarely heard, echoes from the edges of poor urban American communities everywhere. Artists, carpenters, squatters, welfare recipients, retired dockyard workers and their families band together at weddings, funerals, civic meetings and demonstrations in a struggle to survive political neglect. Frequently asked questions of Maureen McNeil and Janet Neuhauser, writer and photographer of RED HOOK STORIES You're both from the Seattle area. How did you arrive in NYC? MAUREEN: I fell in love with New York at age seventeen, on my way to Europe after graduating early from high school. I met my dad's cousin Martha, a dancer who lived in a loft at Westbeth, one of the first subsidized artist living spaces in Greenwich Village and watching her company rehearse and the icebergs that floated down the Hudson day after day, I'd never been so cold or so inspired. I didn't get back to NYC though until after college, in 79. I took a leave of absence from an MFA writing program at San Francisco State and moved here with my boyfriend who was starting graduate school. JANET: I had artist friends I grew up with living in Brooklyn at the time but I moved to New York study photography. What about becoming artists when did you start taking pictures? JANET: I came roundabout to photography. As a small child I watched my dad, an army photographer, develop film at home and at age seven I got my first camera. Later I was blown away looking at my grandmother's photos of farm life in South Dakota where she and my grandfather had homesteaded in the early 1900s. I didn't settle on the profession of photography until after graduating with a second B.A. in classics. I took a class from Steven Soltar at the Factory of Visual Arts and never looked back. MAUREEN: I was about twelve when I decided to be a writer. It was during a discussion with my older brother, Rob, who was renovating a 26 foot schooner so he could sail away and become stateless to avoid the Vietnam draft. He finally got it through my young brain that humans wrote the biblical stories. Suddenly, the pillar of Catholicism fell away and my life goals changed. If I died a saint, okay, but I was going to be a poet. How did you meet? And open a restaurant? Whose idea was that? MAUREEN: The restaurant was Jan's idea. She knew how to cook, not me. We wanted to create something and the restaurant really drew us into a community of conservative government workers and "hippie" college students. The Evergreen State College had only opened the year before and there was quite a clash. Olympians, including my grandfather, felt like they'd been invaded. JANET: It was luck that we met. It was 1972, standing in line to get our college ID photos taken. I gave Mo a bowl of home-made soup and she told me stories of hitch hiking through North Africa. I told her about traveling through Greece and Turkey and soon after she moved into my $55 a month apartment in downtown Olympia. The next year we opened a vegetarian restaurant on West 4th Street, cooking between classes with the help of our five male partners. Art, literature and jazz dominated our daily discussions. Laughing, dreaming out loud and moving to New York City were all we needed to be happy. New York City and love. How did you end up in Red Hook in the 1980s? JANET: I bought a building there in 1982. Mo and Paul bought a small house in 81. We heard about Red Hook from Paul's college counselor, Richard Dutton. They ran into him at a jam session at the Eagle Tavern on 14th Street. He introduced us to Jerry Lombardo, a retired longshoreman, the self-appointed realtor of Re

As lyrical as a sonata, Ayelet Waldman’s follow-up novel to Love and Other Impossible Pursuits explores the aftermath of a family tragedy. Set on the coast of Maine over the course of four summers, Red Hook Road tells the story of two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, and of the ways in which their lives are unraveled and stitched together by misfortune, by good intentions and failure, and by love and calamity. A marriage collapses under the strain of a daughter’s death; two bereaved siblings find comfort in one another; and an adopted young girl breathes new life into her family with her prodigious talent for the violin. As she writes with obvious affection for these unforgettable characters, Ayelet Waldman skillfully interweaves life’s finer pleasures—music and literature—with the more mundane joys of living. Within these resonant pages, a vase filled with wildflowers or a cold beer on a hot summer day serve as constant reminders that it’s often the little things that make life so precious.