Alison Lurie

Black geese are flying over little Elena’s village, looking for children to snatch up for the witch Baba Yaga to feast upon. When her parents leave Elena in charge of her baby brother, she should be giving him her undivided attention. Instead, she runs off to play, leaving the baby alone in the yard. Brilliant color …

Are some of the world's most talented children's book authors essentially children themselves? In this engaging series of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Lurie considers this theory, exploring children's classics from many eras and relating them to the authors who wrote them, including Little Women author …

Familiar Spirits is a memoir published in 2000 by American writer Alison Lurie. In it, she recounts a friendship with poet James Merrill and his life partner David Jackson which began in the 1950s. Merrill and Jackson were both wealthy, well-educated men, who lived an openly gay life decades before that was common. …

Foreign Affairs is a 1984 novel by Alison Lurie, which concerns itself with American academics in England. The novel won multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1985, was nominated for the 1984 National Book Award, and was made into a television movie in 1993.

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break way from her controlling family—a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of …