The Anna Papers

A writer's suicide sends ripples through the world she left behind: "A wonderful book...moving and tender and tough and unsentimental, all at the same time."— Chicago Tribune An accomplished author with a string of devoted lovers, Anna Hand savors life in all of its bittersweet, fleeting moments. So when she gets a letter and discovers her brother has a daughter he never knew about, she sees a major part of life that has passed her by: a child to love. Desperate to unite this young girl with her father, Anna moves back to Charlotte, North Carolina, to rediscover her family and convince him to accept her. Caught between the politics of her upper-crust family and love for a married man, Anna finds her health in serious danger. When her bad days catch up with her good ones, she must finally face the disease that had been hiding just beneath the surface. Not willing to resign herself to months of aggressive treatment, and knowing the outcome will be the same regardless, she takes matters into her own hands, and surrenders her body to the sea. But it isn't only Anna's death that shocks her family. The papers she left behind may lead her sister Helen to discover more about Anna than she, or any of the Hand family, need to know... "Gilchrist excels in drawing the bonds of love and resentment in sexual and family relationships, and no one who encounters her characters here or in her earlier works will want to miss reading about them again." — Publishers Weekly "Throw'em down!" "Throw'em down!" "Throw'em down!" The roar of men's voices rises up from the street like a geyser, falling away, then shooting upward with new intensity."Okay...throw'em down my panties," Liz says, reaching back an arm to pull open her dresser drawer without even lifting her eyes from the pages of her book. Feeling around, she plucks out a pair of red lace panties and tosses them over to Francie."Go on, toss them out the window. Give those sweet Florida farm boys a little thrill. You know how boys are, Francie, at this age, with their hot little hormones..."The voices are deep, surprisingly in tune: a boys' church choir grown up. Francie pictures the moist red lips of the men, their earnest, needy faces upturned to the windows of the cloistered women."You're not serious, Liz. You must be kidding, aren't you?"Liz is reading again, with perfect concentration. In her sheer white baby doll pajamas she looks about eight years old. The coil of her crook-necked lamp flares on the desk like a cobra, its hooded head sending out an aura of light around her yellow hair."They got needs, honey," Liz says... "You know needs? Nature has got its requirements, sweetheart, and you can't go against nature."Glimmering Girls: A Novel of the Fifties tells the story of three extraordinary American women during a time of sexual and cultural repression. Francie and her friends Liz and Amanda are college students, coming of age intellectually, emotionally, and physically in a setting where men were forbidden entry to women's dorm rooms, and women were locked into those rooms after curfew. College life for women was governed by one simple, cardinal rule: Marry Before Graduation or Be Lost Forever. Any thirst for adventure was supposed to be satisfied by the occasional panty raid.Francie and friends, however, find all this hard to swallow, and they resist their appointed futures as elementary school teachers and holders of the precious "MRS" degree. Doing the unthinkable, the three move off campus to live in a house with three men-Liz's boyfriend and two handsome, mysterious Southern twins who fix foreign cars in a shop off campus. There the young women's rebellion against expectations deepens, and they begin the real-world education of pursuing their dreams.Francie yearns to be a writer, and is encouraged by her Russian literature professor. Then she meets Joshua, a talented and dedicated piano student, who presents the ultimate challenge: does she maintain her "virtue," or give in to her sexual desires, finally breaking fully free of repressive "respectability"?Glimmering Girls follows Francie, Liz, and Amanda through this and other discoveries and adventures. Ultimately, each finds a way to live fully at a time when their entire culture seemed arrayed against them. "The world Ellen Gilchrist unfolds in her vivid new story collection is rich with intimate exchanges between finely etched characters." — The New York Times Book Review Ellen Gilchrist proves herself once again to be a master of the intertwining tale in this collection of stories following the lives of different members of a Mississippi social elite, humorously nicknamed "The Cabal." In the novella that inspired the collection's title, the most powerful person in a room is the one who has been trusted with all of its secrets. This has made psychotherapist, Jim Jaspers', recent bizarre behavior not just worrying, but terrifying to Jackson, Mississippi's intellectual elite and what Caroline's best friend Augustus calls "the cabal". The best psychotherapist for miles, Jim knows everyone's darkest truths, and, addled after the death of his patient, Jean Lyles, he'll tell anyone who will listen. The secret inner lives that put an entire community on the hunt for one man in "The Cabal" are deliciously and at times humorously explored in "The Sanguine Blood of Men", "Hearts of Dixie", "The Survival of the Fittest", "Bare Ruined Choirs" and "The Big Clean Up". With a bold cast of characters and surprises at every turn, this is an absolute must-read for fans of Southern literature. Gilchrist has uncanny ability to blend salacious plots with endearing characters. "Gilchrist excels in drawing the bonds of love and resentment in sexual and family relationships, and no one who encounters her characters here or in her earlier works will want to miss reading about them again." 'Publishers Weekly To Anna Hand, death happens when you allow it to. An accomplished author with a string of devoted lovers, Anna Hand savors life in all of its bittersweet, fleeting moments. So when she gets a letter from the illegitimate child of her brother, she sees a major part of life that has passed her by, a child to love. Desperate to unite this young girl with her father, Anna moves back to Charlotte, North Carolina, to rediscover her family and convince her brother to accept the daughter he knew nothing about. Caught between the politics of her uppercrust family and love for a married man, Anna finds her health in serious danger. When Anna's bad days catch up with her good ones, she must finally face the disease that had been hiding just beneath the surface. Not willing to resign herself to months of aggressive treatment, and knowing the outcome will be the same regardless, she takes matters into her own hands, and surrenders her body to the sea. But it isn't only Anna's death that shocks her family. The papers she left behind may lead her sister Helen to discover more about Anna than she, or any of the Hand family, need to know Glimmering Girls tells the story of three extraordinary American women during a time of sexual and cultural repression. Francie and her friends Liz and Amanda are college students, coming of age intellectually, emotionally, and physically in a setting where men were forbidden entry to women's dorm rooms, and women were locked into those rooms after curfew. College life for women was governed by one simple, cardinal rule: Marry Before Graduation or Be Lost Forever. Any thirst for adventure was supposed to be satisfied by the occasional panty raid. Francie and friends, however, find all this hard to swallow, and they resist their appointed futures as elementary school teachers and holders of the precious “MRS” degree. Francie yearns to be a writer and is encouraged by her Russian literature professor. Then she meets Joshua, a talented and dedicated piano student, who presents the ultimate challenge: does she maintain her “virtue,” or give in to her sexual desires, finally breaking fully free of repressive “respectability”? Glimmering Girls follows Francie, Liz, and Amanda through this and other discoveries and adventures. Ultimately, each finds a way to live fully at a time when their entire culture seemed arrayed against them.