Sarah and Warren’s college love story ended in a single moment. Decades later, when a chance meeting brings them together again, a passion ignites—shaking the foundations of the lives they’ve built apart. Sarah is hesitant to reclaim a chance at love after her painful divorce, focusing instead on her career and grown children. Warren has no such reservations: he wants to leave his marriage but worries about how his wife and daughter will react. As their affair intensifies without resolution, Sarah and Warren must confront the moral responsibilities that complicate the demands of love. Leaving charts a passage through loyalty and desire as it builds to a shattering conclusion. In her boldest work to date, Roxana Robinson brings “her compassionate clarity to this revelatory book about the price of love and the enduring need for it� (Amy Bloom, author of In Love).

This is without question the best book ever written on O’Keeffe' New Yorker Born on a wheat farm in Wisconsin in 1887, the second of seven children, Georgia O’Keeffe had her eyes wide open to the beauty of nature from the very beginning, and by her twenties had become a formidable artist, and a strikingly original and spirited young woman. Moving first to Chicago and then to New York to pursue her studies, her consciousness was enlarged by her discovery of the modernist movement, and by the work both produced and shown by the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. Making her way in the world – first as a commercial artist and then as an art teacher – O’Keeffe developed her own original style. When Alfred Stieglitz discovered her work he was the first to exhibit it. Twenty-three years her senior, Stieglitz later fell in love with the artist as well as the work. O’Keeffe moved to New York in 1918 and married Stieglitz in 1924. She found herself a muse as well as an artist, and entered a circle of America’s most vibrant and boundary-pushing artists – and became herself one of the most important and successful of them all. But O’Keeffe fell in love again – this time with the bewitching landscapes of New Mexico,. She began spending half of each year there, and when Stieglitz died in 1949 she moved there for good, and lived there for the rest of her life, taking pleasure in the otherworldly beauty of the Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiú. Following O’Keeffe’s early bud and sensational bloom, her loves, losses, agonies and ecstasies, and her painting against the dying of the light, Roxana Robinson’s spellbinding and definitive biography has now been updated for the twenty-first century with a new foreword and access to never-before-seen letters. Written with the cooperation of the O’Keeffe family, and with access to sources closed to biographers during O’Keeffe’s lifetime, It remains an unparalleled portrait of one of the most important female artists of all time.

In Roxana Robinson's lucid and elegant prose, her characters' inner worlds open up to us, revealing private emotional cores that are familiar in their needs, their secrets, and their longings. These people tell us the truth-not only about themselves, their relationships, and their lives, but about ourselves as well.
In "Family Christmas," a young girl takes a holiday trip to her grandparents', where the formal atmosphere is shattered by a mysterious and chaotic event that she knows she's too young to understand but struggles to comprehend.
In "Blind Man," a college professor copes with the onslaught of grief after his daughter's death. In "The Face Lift," two college friends renew their bond across a great cultural divide. The sad and hilarious "Assistance" flawlessly details the tragicomic aspects of ageing-seen through the eyes of a daughter-turned-caretaker. The terrors of illness are explored in "The Treatment," and in "Assez," a trip to Provence reveals the true volatility of love-and reminds us that we often don't realize that what we have is enough until it's gone.
"A Perfect Stranger powerfully and affectingly examines the complex, intricate network of experiences that binds us to one another. These stories are tender, raw, lovely, and fine-and they reaffirm Roxana Robinson's place at the forefront of modern literature.

Roxana Robinson's great gift for the telling detail and strong sense of the emotional shoals lurking just beneath even the calmest surface have inspired comparisons to literary greats like John Cheever, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. In her first novel, we meet Laura, a 29-year-old wife, mother, sister, friend, lover, and erstwhile photographer whose life is painfully out of focus. A month's vacation on the Maine coast with her son, her lover, Ward, and her sister's family is supposed to be an idyllic period of sustenance and calm, but for Laura, who believes that "entropy governed the world, the universe, and the dinner hour," it turns into the ultimate test of her ability to trust herself and others.
With trademark intensity and a deft touch for character and place, Robinson creates a perceptive, believable, and gently humorous portrait of an individual "waiting for something that would set her life in order." Laura is as much a study of light and shadow as the photographs she takes. Beautiful but insecure, talented but unwilling to take risks, loved but unable to make a commitment, she is paralyzed by fear and locked into a stasis that Ward is no longer willing to accept. "You don't dare take a stand on anything," he tells her. "You're so terrified of failure you don't dare do anything." When her estranged husband arrives for a weekend visit, however, the emotional collision rocks Laura's inaction, causing a tiny shake of the kaleidoscope that creates a vastly different pattern. The image is razor sharp at last: "As though she were changing lenses, as though she had suddenly discovered another light source," she sees that her life is her own. That new understanding empowers her to make a symbolic -- and a literal -- leap of faith that saves her own life and the lives of those she loves.

Conrad Farrell does not come from a military family, but as a classics major at Williams College, he has encountered the powerful appeal of the Marine Corps ethic: "Semper Fidelis" comes straight from Sparta, a society where every citizen doubled as a full-time soldier. When Conrad graduates, he joins the Marines to continue a long tradition of honor, courage, and commitment over the course of a four-year tour in Iraq. When we meet him, he has just come home to Katonah, New York. As Conrad attempts to find his footing in the civilian world, he learns how hard it is to return to the people and places he used to love. Gradually, he awakens to a growing rage and the realization that something has gone wrong.
Suspenseful, compassionate, and perceptive, Roxana Robinson's "Sparta" "is a beautifully written novel that illuminates what happens when we're estranged from the world as we know it" ("Chicago Tribune").

Julia Lambert, an artist, is spending the summer in her old Maine farmhouse. During a visit from her elderly parents, she hopes to mend complicated relationships with her domineering father, a retired neurosurgeon, and her gentle mother, who is descending into the fog of Alzheimer's. But a shattering revelation intrudes: Julia's son, Jack, has spiraled into heroin addiction. In her attempts to save him, Julia marshals help from her loosely knit clan, but Jack's addiction courses through the family with a devastating energy, sweeping them all into a world of confusion, fear, and obsession. In "Cost," Roxana Robinson applies her "trademark gifts as an intelligent, sensitive analyst of family life" and creates a "warmly human and deeply satisfying book, marking a new level of ambition and achievement for this talented author" ("Chicago Tribune").

Roxana Robinson is the author of four novels and three short-story collections, as well as a biography of Georgia O'Keeffe. Four of these were named Notable Books of the Year by "The New York Times." Her work has appeared in "The New Yorker," "The" "Atlantic," "Harper's Magazine," "The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, " and "Vogue," among other publications. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches at the New School in New York. Longlisted for the International IMPAC Literary AwardA "New York Times Book Review" Editors' Choice
Named a 'Good Read' by the National Book Critics Circle
A "Washington Post" Top Five Book of the Year
A "Wall Street Journal" Best Book of the Year
A "Seattle Times" Best Book of the Year
A "Library Journal" Best Book of the Year In "Cost," Roxana Robinson tackles addiction and explores its effects on the bonds of family with her hallmark subtlety and precision in evoking the emotional interiors of her characters. The result is a work in which the reader's compassion for every character remains unflagging to the end.
When Julia Lambert, an art professor, settles into her idyllic Maine house for the summer, she plans to spend the time tending her fragile relationships with her father, a repressive neurosurgeon, and her gentle mother, who is descending into Alzheimer's. But a shattering revelation intrudes: Julia's son Jack has spiraled into heroin addiction.
In an attempt to save him, Julia marshals help from her looseknit clan: elderly parents; remarried ex-husband; removed sister; and combative eldest son. Ultimately, heroin courses through the characters' lives with an impersonal and devastating energy, sweeping the family into a world in which deceit, crime, and fear are part of daily life. "Robinson's fourth novel is an engrossing tale of a patrician family's unraveling during a summer in Maine. Julia Lambert is a divorced artist, trying to entertain her oppressive, former neurosurgeon father (he points out everything that's wrong with his daughter's run-down cabin) and her self-effacing mother, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. Julia's elder son suspects that his younger brother, Jack, is a heroin addict, and when this turns out to be true an intervention is staged. The family's ugly, dysfunctional history pours out in the process, in sharp contrast with the halcyon setting. Robinson moves nimbly among the numerous characters' mind-sets, and although Julia's meditations on 'the long tradition of luminist painting' can drag, Jack's story maintains its tension until the final, affecting pages."--"The New Yorker
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""Cost" is unusual for being as plot-driven as it is character-driven, and the assured manner in which Robinson builds toward the inevitable train wreck is matched by her acuity in bringing us inside the characters' minds . . . [Julia] gains the strength not only to bear a grievous separation from her younger son but, more significant, to question the separations she has imposed on the most intimate relationships in her life. Why, she wonders, has she done this? . . . Robinson has already shown us why, having exhumed the many reasons in the preceding pages. But the question remains worth asking, not only by Julia but by any of these characters--by anyone, period, still struggling to connect. With the novel's final words, which made me catch my breath, Robinson suggests the enormous stakes involved in pursuing the answer."--"The New York Times Book Review"

"Scarily good . . . I've never read such a spot-on description of the mingled feelings of affection and frustration one feels for one's parents as Robinson spins out here with sometimes comic effect . . . One of our best writers."--"The Washington Post"
""Cost "is both lyrical and unsentimental, richly honest and humane--summer reading of uncommon stature."--"The Wall Street Journal"
"Set mostly in a Maine summerhouse more charming than functional, this is a strikingly realistic, psychologically astute study of family relations in modern America's educated class. As in a family itself, competing perceptions of events past and present crowd the pages. Self-involved preoccupations overwhelm many touching moments of understanding; defensive postures become hurtful habits nearly impossible to shift. But when compared with the single-minded obsession of the younger son, whose heroin addiction organizes the plot, the degree to which the rest of the characters value and care for one another, despite their normal measure of self-interest, is arresting. Robinson gracefully launches and bolsters her psychological insights with concrete details of her settings. As always, she writes with impressive polish at both the sentence and structural levels."--"The Atlantic Monthly
"""Cost" is such an apt title for the latest book of novelist and Mount Desert summer resident Roxana Robinson. In the novel, much of which is set in Maine, the cost to Julia Lambert, the protagonist, and to her immediate and extended family of her son Jack's heroin addiction cannot be quantified, nor can the cost of the alienation between Julia and her aging parents. In reading this novel--even when some of the details made me uncomfortable--I cannot ignore how Robinson's characters exemplify people I know and how perceptively she depicts them. As the plot unfolds, the reader slowly realizes not only that the costs are searing and exist on so many levels--psychological, emotional, financial, physiological--but also that various characters in their interior monologues frequently allude to 'risk.' And taking risks incurs costs. Robinson's mastery of the interior monologue gives the narrative depth and intimacy. One identifies with the character and intuits what may occur. While Jack's heroin addiction is not immediately known, the reminiscences of his parents, brother and grandparents' throughout the novel reveal that Jack has always courted trouble. 'Jack always went too far. His exploits were too perilous, the risks always too great, ' recalls Steven, his older brother. But the costs in the novel extend beyond the cost of heroin addiction and alienation. There are the emotional costs of losing a beloved son, and there are the physical, mental and emotional costs of aging. Robinson effectively portrays these costs, particularly in her characteriz

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