| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||
Kaye Gibbons
new books, used books, rare books by Kaye Gibbons
› Find all books by 'Kaye Gibbons' and compare prices› Find signed collectible books by 'Kaye Gibbons'
-
Charms for the Easy Lifeby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0060760257 (0-06-076025-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Charms for the Easy Life'Book summary:A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeatlives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina.In a sad and singular era, they are unique among womenof their time. For radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy andbrilliant daughter Margaret possess powerful charmsto ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that alltoo often beats a path to their door. And they are protectedthrough the years by the eccentric wisdom and muscular loveof the most stalwart Birch of all -- a solid, unbending anduncompromising self-taught healer who can cure everythingfrom boils to broken hones to broken hearts ... a remarkablematriarch who calls herself Charlie Kate.
Charms for the Easy Life is the passionate, luminous, andexhilarating New York Times bestseller by Kaye Gibbons,the acclaimed author of Ellen Foster and Sights Unseen. [via]
More editions of Charms for the Easy Life:
- Charms for the Easy Life: ISBN 0380722704 (0-380-72270-4)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers - Charms for the Easy Life: ISBN 0349106096 (0-349-10609-6)
Softcover, Little, Brown Book Group Limited - Charms for the Easy Life: ISBN 0380725576 (0-380-72557-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins - Charms for the Easy Life: ISBN 034910557X (0-349-10557-X)
Hardcover, Carolina Biological Supply Company - Charms for the Easy Life: ISBN 0349105588 (0-349-10558-8)
Hardcover, Carolina Biological Supply Company - Charms for the Easy Life: ISBN 0060760257 (0-06-076025-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins
- Charms for the Easy Life: ISBN 0380722704 (0-380-72270-4)
Divining Womenby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0060760281 (0-06-076028-1)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Divining Women'More editions of Divining Women:
-
Ellen Fosterby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0375703055 (0-375-70305-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Ellen Foster'Book summary:Oprah Book ClubŪ Selection, October 1997: Kaye Gibbons is a writer who brings a short story sensibility to her novels. Rather than take advantage of the novel's longer form to paint her visions in broad, sweeping strokes, Gibbons prefers to concentrate on just one corner of the canvas and only a few colors to produce her small masterpieces. In Gibbons's case, her canvas is the American South and her colors are all the shades of gray.
In Ellen Foster, the title character is an 11-year-old orphan who refers to herself as "old Ellen," an appellation that is disturbingly apt. Ellen is an old woman in a child's body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative's home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong. There is something almost Dickensian about Ellen's tribulations; like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or a host of other literary child heroes, Ellen is at the mercy of predatory adults, with only her own wit and courage--and the occasional kindness of others--to help her through. That she does, in fact, survive her childhood and even rise above it is the book's bittersweet victory. [via]
The Life All Around Me by Ellen Fosterby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0156032902 (0-15-603290-2)
Softcover, Harcourt
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster'More editions of The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster:
- The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster: ISBN 0151012040 (0-15-101204-0)
Hardcover, Harcourt Trade Publishers - The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster: ISBN 0375728511 (0-375-72851-1)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print - The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster: ISBN 0156032902 (0-15-603290-2)
Softcover, Harcourt
- The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster: ISBN 0151012040 (0-15-101204-0)
-
On the Occasion of My Last Afternoonby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0060797142 (0-06-079714-2)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon'Book summary:Polly Holliday of TV's Home Improvement won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, "aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously." Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that "effused" as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.
Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried Cold Mountain from his grip and got it into publishers' hands.
But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.
Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, "a pluperfect son of Satan." Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.
The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period.
One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.--Tim Appelo [via]
More editions of On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon:
-
Sights Unseenby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0060797150 (0-06-079715-0)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sights Unseen'Book summary:The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Ellen Foster,Kaye Gibbons paints intimate family portraits in lyrical prose, using as her palette the rich, vibrant colors of the American South. Sights Unseen shows the author at her most passionate and heartfelt best -- an unforgettable tale of unconditional love, and of a family's desperate search for normalcy in the midst of mental illness. It is a novel of rare poignancy, wit, and evocative power -- the story of the relationship between Hattie Barnes and her emotionally elusive mother, Maggie, known by their neighbors as "that Barnes woman with all the problems."
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more. [via]More editions of Sights Unseen:
- Sights Unseen: ISBN 0349107599 (0-349-10759-9)
Softcover, Little, Brown Book Group Limited - Sights Unseen: ISBN 0380726815 (0-380-72681-5)
Softcover, Harpercollins - Sights Unseen: ISBN 0380729725 (0-380-72972-5)
Softcover, Harpercollins - Sights Unseen: ISBN 0316878561 (0-316-87856-1)
Hardcover, Little, Brown Book Group Limited - Sights Unseen: ISBN 0060797150 (0-06-079715-0)
Softcover, Harpercollins
- Sights Unseen: ISBN 0349107599 (0-349-10759-9)
A Virtuous Womanby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0375703063 (0-375-70306-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Virtuous Woman'
![[powered by Muze Inc.]](http://i.bookfinder.com/images/site/muze/powered_by_muze.gif){kind=small}