This book unfolds in a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, cauldrons of spicy crawfish, and passionate football fandom. But in the summer of 1989, when fifteen-year-old Lindy Simpson--free spirit, track star, and belle of the block--experiences a horrible crime late one evening near her home, it becomes apparent that this idyllic stretch of Southern suburbia has a dark side, too.
Bea Maxwell has been kissed only once and has never been in love. Apart from a stint away in Chicago, she has always lived in Green Bay, Wisconsin where she cares for her invalid mother. Mona Simpson charts Bea's solitary but self-possessed life and her relationships with her old friend, June, and the polio-afflicted Shelley. All three women's lives are linked through Bill, Bea's jazz-loving boss and the town cad. Off Keck Road is an exquisite novella that reminds us of the positive virtues o...
"Just before Henry Aster's birth, his father -- outsized literary ambition and pregnant wife in tow -- reluctantly returns to the small Appalachian town in which he was raised and installs his young family in an immense house of iron and glass perched high on the side of a mountain. There, Henry grows up under the writing desk of this fiercely brilliant man. But when tragedy tips his father toward a fearsome unraveling, what was once a young son's reverence is poisoned and Henry flees, not to re...
