Background
Robinson, Roxana Barry was born on November 30, 1946 in Pine Mountain, Kentucky, United States.
(This is a novel set in the old-guard WASP enclaves of Man...)
This is a novel set in the old-guard WASP enclaves of Manhattan, Connecticut, Long Island and Maine, peopled with men and women whose loves are in various stages of repair or disarray. There marriages are usually re-marriages. Their children are shuttling between apartments, suburbs and summer houses.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0747531609/?tag=2022091-20
(In this brilliant, luminous novel, one of our finest real...)
In this brilliant, luminous novel, one of our finest realist writers gives us a story of surpassing depth and emotional power. Acclaimed for her lucid and compassionate exploration of the American family, Roxana Robinson sets her new work on familiar terrain—New York City and the Adirondacks—but with Sweetwater she transcends the particulars of the domestic sphere with a broader, more encompassing vision. In this poignant account of a young widow and her second marriage, Robinson expands her scope to include the larger natural world as well as the smaller, more intimate one of the home. Isabel Green’s marriage to Paul Simmons, after the death of her first husband, marks her reconnection to life—a venture she’s determined will succeed. But this proves to be harder than she’d anticipated, and the challenges of starting afresh seem more complicated in adulthood. Staying at the Simmons lodge for their annual summer visit, Isabel finds herself entering into a set of familial complexities. She struggles to understand her new husband, his elderly, difficult parents and his brother, whose relationship with Paul seems oddly fraught. Furthermore, her second marriage begins to cast into sharp relief the troubling echoes of her first. Isabel’s professional life plays a part as well: a passionate environmental advocate, she is aware of the tensions within the mountain landscape itself during a summer of spectacular beauty and ominous drought. In her cool, elegant prose, Robinson gracefully delivers a plot that is complex, surprising and ultimately wrenching in its impact. As the strands of family are woven tightly and inevitably together, and as the past painfully informs the present, the vivid backdrop of the physical world provides its own eloquent dynamic. Sweetwater is a stunning achievement by a writer at the peak of her craft. From the Hardcover edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812967348/?tag=2022091-20
(These stories of upper-middle-class family life concern r...)
These stories of upper-middle-class family life concern relationships between men and women, mistrust and infidelities, broken families, and stepparents and stepchildren. With characteristic delicacy and empathy, Robinson probes the terrible emotional constrictions her characters suffer in such stories as "Handicapped," "The Time for Kissing," and "Tears Before Bedtime." Other stories trace the complexities of friendship and forgiveness and the devotion and resignation of old age. In the title story, a suspicious wife makes much of her husband's casual lunch date, recalling her own affair and that of a couple seen by chance on the street--in "a moment of widening freedom, possibility" implied merely by "a glimpse of scarlet" in the woman's scarf or sleeve. Robinson's stories have been published in The New Yorker , Atlantic , and Southern Review . She is also the author of the novel Summer Light ( LJ 6/1/88) and Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life ( LJ 9/15/89). A touchingly intimate, human collection.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060981164/?tag=2022091-20
(In Roxana Robinson’s lucid and elegant prose, her charact...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375509186/?tag=2022091-20
Robinson, Roxana Barry was born on November 30, 1946 in Pine Mountain, Kentucky, United States.
Attended, Bennington College, 1964—1966. Studied with Bernard Malamud and Howard Nemerov. Bachelor in English Literature, University Michigan, 1969.
Art cataloguer Sotheby's, New York City, 1970-1974. Exhibition director Terry Dintenfass Gallery, 1974-1976. Freelance writer, since 1976.
Instructor creative writing department University Houston, 2001, Wesleyan University, 2002—2003, instructor Wesleyan Writers' Conference. Lecturer Bennington College, University Southern Indiana, George Mason University.
(In Roxana Robinson’s lucid and elegant prose, her charact...)
(This is a novel set in the old-guard WASP enclaves of Man...)
(These stories of upper-middle-class family life concern r...)
(In this brilliant, luminous novel, one of our finest real...)
Trustee Eugene Lang College, New York, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, since 1995, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association American Center, New York, since 1998.