(Meet eight-year-old Kate and her sisters as they take to ...)
Meet eight-year-old Kate and her sisters as they take to a life on the road when their divorced mother falls in love with someone new. This strange freedom introduces the girls to a way of life that is vastly different from the one they knew with their geologist father. But, far from him, adult distraction and carelessness finally threaten to explode and ruin Kate's life.
Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits
(Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits is...)
Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits is a radiant collection of original photographs and life stories by Jenny, Laura, and Martha McPhee, sisters who know a great deal about being girls (they were raised in the sixties and seventies, at the height of the women's movement) and about being around other girls (there were five sisters in the family, not to mention a mom, a stepmom, and four stepsisters), and who are now raising girls of their own. Girls will introduce you to a rich and diverse population - extraordinary girls pursuing their passions and "normal" girls discovering creative ways to define themselves.
(Charismatic therapist Anton Furey is dying, and the tribe...)
Charismatic therapist Anton Furey is dying, and the tribe he heads-his five children, his wife's three, and their uniting child, Alice-has returned to Chardin, the farm where they grew up and played out Anton's vision of communal living. They had been famous for being the new American blended family, their utopian lifestyle chronicled by film crews and reporters. But as Anton grows weaker, the hurts and betrayals of those years boil to the surface, and the children find themselves reliving the knotty intimacies they share as they struggle to make their peace with Anton.
(In the brilliant Greek sunshine of a small Aegean island,...)
In the brilliant Greek sunshine of a small Aegean island, Beth and Cesare meet - beginning a transformative love affair that spans two continents, two decades, and two lifetimes. Cesare is a privileged Italian boy, raised in a prosperous town where his family has lived for five hundred years; Beth, an ambitious American dreamer born to hippies and raised on a commune. The events of September 11 serve as a catalyst for the unfolding of their story, in which passion struggles against the inexorable force of Patria.
(In this Pygmalion tale of a novelist turned bond trader, ...)
In this Pygmalion tale of a novelist turned bond trader, Martha McPhee brings to life the greed and riotous wealth of New York during the heady days of the second gilded age. India Palmer, living the cash-strapped existence of the writer, is visiting wealthy friends in Maine when a yellow biplane swoops down from the clear blue sky to bring a stranger into her life, one who will change everything. The stranger is Win Johns, a swaggering and intellectually bored trader of mortgage-backed securities. Charmed by India’s intelligence, humor, and inquisitive nature - and aware of her near-desperate financial situation - Win poses a proposition: “Give me eighteen months and I’ll make you a world-class bond trader.” Shedding her artist’s life with surprising ease, India embarks on a raucous ride to the top of the income chain, leveraging herself with crumbling real estate, never once looking back. Or does she?
Martha McPhee is an American novelist and translator. She is a Professor of English at Hofstra University as well.
Background
Martha McPhee was born in 1965 in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. She is the daughter of John McPhee and Pryde Brown. She has three sisters, Jenny, Laura, and Sarah. She was raised with her father, his stepchildren, and her sisters.
Education
Martha McPhee attended Princeton High School. Then she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bowdoin College in 1987. She got a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1997.
Martha McPhee began her writing career in 1994 when she translated the book Crossing the Threshold of Hope by His Holiness John Paul II with her sister Jenny McPhee. She also got involved in the writing of her first novel Bright Angel Time (1997). The book, set in 1970, is written as the retrospective first-person narrative of eight-year-old Kate who, with her two older sisters, lived in a conventional, organized, structured, suburban family environment. The novel provides ample scenery - landscapes, resorts, motels, and roads - and emotional drama in the relationships developed between characters.
Like the first novel, the follow-up novel Gorgeous Lies (2002) is a semi-autobiographic story based on her childhood in a family that included a lot of kids. Both books are about growing up in a communal blended household in the 70s run by a dictatorial patriarch. In Gorgeous Lies, the patriarch is dying. The children try to make peace with their father and each other. McPhee also wrote L’America (2006), a love story about an American girl reared on a hippie commune and an Italian boy whose family has lived in the same village for centuries, and Dear Money (2010), a modern Pygmalion story set on Wall Street.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, The Chicago Tribune, Travel & Leisure, More, Tin House, The American Scholar, and many other publications. She contributed short fiction to the New Yorker, Zoetrope, Redbook, and Open City. She was also the co-author of Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits (2000) and Open City (2000). From 2002 Martha McPhee teaches at Hofstra University where she is a Professor of English.