In Natural History, Andrea Barrett completes the beautiful arc of intertwined lives of a family of scientists, teachers, and innovators that she has been weaving through multiple books since her National Book Award–winning collection, Ship Fever. The six exquisite stories in Natural History are set largely in a small community in central New York state and portray some of her most beloved characters, spanning the decades between the Civil War to the present day. In “Henrietta and Her Moths,� a woman tends to an insect nursery as her sister’s life follows a different path. In “Open House,� a young man grapples with a choice between a thrilling life spent discovering fossils and a desire to remain close to home. And in the magnificent title novella, “Natural History,� Barrett deepens the connection between her characters, bringing us through to the present day and providing an unforgettable capstone. Told with Barrett’s characteristic elegance, passion for science, and wonderful eye for the natural world, the psychologically astute and moving stories gathered in this collection evoke the ways women’s lives and expectations—in families, in work, and in love—have shifted across a century and more. Building upon one another, these tales brilliantly culminate to reveal how the smallest events of the past can have large reverberations across the generations, and how potent, wondrous, and strange the relationship between history and memory can be.

The Narwhal has a simple mission: to find the remains—human and material—of a disappeared ship. But its rash and obsessive young commander, Zeke Voorhees, has ulterior motives that may spell doom for the Narwhal and its crew. His soon-to-be brother-in-law, scholar-naturalist Erasmus Darwin Wells, may be the only one aboard who can alter their fate. Back in Philadelphia, the women left behind make journeys of the imagination as they await the Narwhal’s return. Wielding her signature lyrical and precise style, Andrea Barrett unravels the mid-nineteenth-century American romance with the Arctic in a "genuine page turner that long lingers in the mind" (Philip Graham, Chicago Tribune).

Exceptional tales of emancipation and evolution at the birth of the modern era. Winner of US National Book Award. 'Andrea Barrett's work stands out for its sheer intelligence. The overall effect is quietly dazzling.' New York Times Set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century, this elegant collection of stories take their impulse from the world of science. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they illuminate the secret passions of those driven by a devotion to, and an intimate acquaintance with, the natural world. 'Barrett's stories fascinate...she pulls us into them as into fast-moving water.' San Francisco Chronicle 'Beautiful stories about the wonder and work of science. The title novella describes the horrors of typhus in the newly arrived Irish immigrants to Quebec, and suggests that, in epidemics, medicine is more a piece of politics than a form of science. In Barrett's hands, science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material.' Boston Globe 'An extraordinary story collection. Barrett blends a sure grasp of the history and method of science into each of her evocative tales.' Chicago Tribune 'Many of these stories are set in the late nineteenth century, the adolescence of modern science. Barrett's women are often scoffed at for their love of learning. Some try to use science as a currency with which to buy acceptance in a male-dominated world. But no character relates only to his or her work. Barrett builds her fictions like stones thrown into prose ponds: science is the stone, while human dramas, personal and social, are the concentric rings that radiate beautifully outward.' Newsday

'Radiant…Barrett is a writer of huge imagination. Like Michael Ondaatje, she brings the curious and the obscure to life with great resonance and poetry'
'Daily Telegraph'

A mapper of the highest mountain peaks realizes his true obsession; a young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with a romantic fantasy; brothers and sister, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion…Ranging across two centuries, and from the western Himalayas to an Adirondack village, these wonderfully imagined novellas and stories travel the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery.

'Andrea Barrett writes as persuasively about the mysteries of science as she does about the mysteries of the human heart. These stories possess a wonderful clarity and ease, the serene authority of a writer working at the very height of her powers.'
'New York Times'

'Barrett's insights into the stormier regions of the heart offer plenty of restorative balm.'
'Independent'

'Barrett brings to life the longings, eagerness and hidden passions of assorted wanderers over the last two centuries. Infinitely pleasurable escapism.'

"Zeke Voorhies is commanding an expedition which sets sail from Massachusetts to discover the fate of Sir John Franklin who vanished in the far north. In his company of disgruntled sailors and misfits is Erasmus Darwin Wells, a middle-aged naturalist whose life, until now, has been a series of frustrations and disappointments. It is nit quite right to call Erasmus the hero of this story; heroism is not his line. Yet it is his vision which shapes the novel. Barrett's treatment of character is subtle and powerful. The awkward Erasmus, the dashing Zeke, thoughtful surgeon Dr Boerhaave: all are brought to alive with tenderness and insight. Andrea Barrett has an original, memorable voice. 'The Voyage of the Narwhal' is strange and rare, a journey to the unexplored lands that lie in the distant latitudes and exist inside us all. Wrap up warm and come aboard."
ERICA WAGNER 'The Times'

"This is a fabulous novel…exciting, sensual, brilliantly executed and, as I the great novels, the exterior voyage becomes the metaphor for the unfolding of the human spirit."
ELIZABETH BUCHAN

"Half boy's adventure story of the highest class, half a kind of meditation on the nature of human curiosity, 'The Voyage of the Narwhal' is wonderful stuff. The first thing I did on finishing it was to sit down and start again."
D.J.TAYLOR 'Spectator'

"Full of blood-freezing surprises, a score of indelible characters and heart-stopping mysteries. It is amazing the most emotionally wrenching, subtle works of the century."
AMAZON.COM

"A twisting novel…subtle and deft…shadowing and ambiguous."
JOANNA GRIFFITHS, 'Observer'

Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers to the library or bookstore to read - or re-read - the stories selected. On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values. Among the writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as James, Melville, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver, Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger,Malamud, and Welty; but the book also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen, Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass, and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Edward P. Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected. Among the contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass, Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Spencer, and Mako Yoshikawa. Editor Jackson R. Bryer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland.

In the fall of 1916, America prepares for war—but in the town of Tamarack Lake, the focus is on the sick. Wealthy tubercular patients live in private cure cottages; charity patients, mainly immigrants, fill the large public sanatorium. From within their isolated community, they grapple with some of the most thrilling scientific discoveries of their time—X-ray technology, chemical and biological weapons, changing theories of atomic structure—and their limitations. Prisoners of routine, they take solace in gossip, rumor, and, sometimes, secret attachments. When the well-meaning efforts of one enterprising patient lead instead to a tragic accident and a terrible betrayal, the war comes home, bringing with it a surge of anti-immigrant prejudice. With The Air We Breathe, Andrea Barrett has crafted a "majestic, breathtaking, [and] thrilling" (San Diego Union-Tribune) novel that brilliantly illuminates the inescapable heartbreak of war.

The lives of the talented Aubrey children have long been clouded by their father's genius for instability, but his new job in the London suburbs promises, for a time at least, reprieve from scandal and the threat of ruin. Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but then she is something of a high-strung eccentric herself, as is all too clear to her daughter Rose, through whose loving but sometimes cruel eyes events are seen. Still, living on the edge holds the promise of the unexpected, and the Aubreys, who encounter furious poltergeists, turn up hidden masterpieces, and come to the aid of a murderess, will find that they have adventure to spare.
In "The Fountain Overflows," a 1957 best seller, Rebecca West transmuted her own volatile childhood into enduring art. This is an unvarnished but affectionate picture of an extraordinary family, in which a remarkable stylist and powerful intelligence surveys the elusive boundaries of childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependency, the ordinary and the occult.

In 1860, fifteen years after Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition disappeared in the Arctic, a Cincinnati businessman named Charles Francis Hall set out to locate and rescue the expedition's survivors. He was an amateur explorer, without any scientific training or experience, but he was driven by a sense of personal destiny and of religious and patriotic mission. Despite the odds against him, he made three forays into the far North, the final--and fatal--one taking him farther north than any westerner had ever gone before. But Hall was suddenly taken ill on that voyage and died under mysterious circumstances.

Ninety-seven years later, Chauncey Loomis headed an expedition to Hall's grave in northwestern Greenland. He exhumed Hall's frozen body and performed an autopsy. His findings suggest that the investigators of Hall's death nervously sidestepped the damning evidence. Loomis has written a masterful biography-cum-mystery that brilliantly evokes the lure of the Arctic and the brutal contest between man and nature.
        
With a new Introduction by Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal

"Luminous....Each [story] is rich and independent and beautiful and should draw Barrett many new admirers."—Publishers Weekly starred review

Ranging across two centuries, and from the western Himalaya to an Adirondack village, these wonderfully imagined stories and novellas travel the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery. A mapper of the highest mountain peaks realizes his true obsession. A young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with a romantic fantasy. Brothers and sisters, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion. Throughout, Barrett's most characteristic theme—the happenings in that borderland between science and desire—unfolds in the diverse lives of unforgettable human beings.

Although each richly layered tale stands independently, readers of Ship Fever (National Book Award winner) and Barrett's extraordinary novel The Voyage of the Narwhal, will discover subtle links both among these new stories and to characters in the earlier works.

The title story of this volume was selected for Best American Short Stories 2001 and for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 2001.

"[O]ne more example of the originality and wit Barrett demonstrates throughout a most distinguished collection of stories."—New York Times Book Review, Barry Unsworth

"Spellbinding....Complex yet ravishing tales of scientific pursuits stoked by loneliness and desire.—Booklist

"Gemlike stories that sparkle with intelligence and fire.—Lisa Shea, O magazine

"Gorgeous, illuminating, entrancing fiction.—Kirkus Reviews starred review

"A wonderful clarity and ease, the serene authority of a writer working at the very height of her powers.—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

At the age of eighty, Brendan Auberon--formerly of the Order of Our Lady of the Valley, now confined to a nursing home--has one last wish: to see his 200 acres overlooking what used to be Paradise Valley, before the villages were drowned to provide water for the city of Boston. Now, Brendan's memories drift beneath the surface of the Stillwater Reservoir. When Brendan dupes his nephew, Henry, into hijacking the nursing home van for the journey, what begins as a lark becomes an adventure infinitely more complex.

For Grace, the ardent yet puzzled heroine of Andrea Barrett's third novel, this trip has been planned as a three-week stay: she's to play dutiful wife to Walter, her prominent scientist husband, at the 1986 Beijing International Conference on the Effects of Acid Rain. Walter is twelve years older than Grace, and as sour as the rain he studies; he and Grace are at a particularly troubled point in their marriage. Their tightly circumscribed visit, however, becomes a journey infinitely less tidy and more complex as Grace falls forever out of love with her husband and very much in love with this country and its culture. In the chaos of the Beijing streets and in the home of her new friends Dr. Yu and her son Zaofan, Grace finds the web of life she's been too lost to perceive. "Time you spend in the past and future is time you spend alone," Dr. Yu tells her. "But between them there is a middle kingdom, both feet planted here."

To coincide with the release of her new novel The Middle Kingdom, here is Barrett's second novel available in paperback. Hailed as "remarkably touching" (The Los Angeles Times), this is a portrait of people struggling to make sense of their lives in the rural hills of western Massachusettes.

A Kite in the Wind is an anthology of essays by 20 veteran writers and master teachers. While the contributors offer specific, practical advice on such fundamental aspects of craft as characterization, character names, the first person point of view, and unreliable narrators, they also give extended, thoughtful consideration to more sophisticated topics, including "imminence," or the power of a sense of beginning; creating and maintaining tension; "lushness"; and the deliberate manipulation of information to create particular effects. The essays in A Kite in the Wind begin as personal investigations -- attempts to understand why a decision in a particular story or novel seemed unsuccessful; to define a quality or problem that seemed either unrecognized or unsatisfactorily defined; to understand what, despite years of experience as a fiction writer, resisted comprehension; and to pursue haunting, even unanswerable questions. Unlike a how-to book, the anthology is less an instruction manual than it is an intimate visit with twenty very different writers as they explore topics that excite, intrigue, and even puzzle them. Each discussion uses specific examples and illustrations, including both canonical stories and novels and writing less frequently discussed, from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, by both American and international authors. The contributors share their hard-earned insights for beginning and advanced writers with humility, wit, and compassion. The first section of the book focuses on narration, with particular attention paid to various kinds of narrators; the second, on strategic creation and presentation of character; the third, on some of the roles of the visual, beginning with establishing setting; and the fourth, on structural and organizational issues, from movement through time to the manipulation of information to create mystery and suspense.

26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work

In a splendid display of show-and-tell, 26 writers tell a story and lift the curtain to reveal how they did it.

This big, beautiful anthology of short fiction is for readers, writers, and anyone curious about the mysterious processes of literary minds. All contributors have been recent faculty members of the prestigious Warren Wilson Low Residency Program, including such literary favorites as Margot Livesey, Charles Baxter, Robert Boswell, Jim Shepard, Antonya Nelson, David Shields, and the editors themselves.

Each writer was asked to submit an original story, accompanied by an essay describing the challenges of the story and how they were met. Since writers resist herding, the editors were happily surprised by the wide range of essays—"fiction writers, when given the space, think about their work very differently." We learn about the genesis of a story, how story evolves, what was eventually relinquished and why, and how a story—surprisingly—might "insist" on changing.

Arranged alphabetically by author, and beginning with Richard Russo's cogent introduction, this volume is a treasure throughout.