Robinson, Marilynne

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson ( Book )
87 editions published between 2002 and 2009 in 16 languages and held by 4,016 libraries worldwide
As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson ( Book )
96 editions published between 1980 and 2010 in 8 languages and held by 2,947 libraries worldwide
Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award A modern classic, "Housekeeping" is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.

Home by Marilynne Robinson ( Book )
43 editions published between 2008 and 2010 in 4 languages and held by 2,853 libraries worldwide
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack--the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years--comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Absence of mind : the dispelling of inwardness from the modern myth of the self by Marilynne Robinson ( Book )
3 editions published between 2010 and 2011 in English and held by 830 libraries worldwide
"In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought?science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson?s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality" --Cover, p. 2.

The death of Adam : essays on modern thought by Marilynne Robinson ( Book )
9 editions published between 1998 and 2005 in English and held by 771 libraries worldwide

Mother country by Marilynne Robinson ( Book )
7 editions published between 1989 and 2010 in English and Undetermined and held by 617 libraries worldwide
"Britain, the welfare state and nuclear pollution"--Dust jacket.

An Introduction to Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson by Dan Stone ( Recording )
2 editions published in 2008 in English and held by 615 libraries worldwide
Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980) tells the story of Ruthie, a quiet, friendless girl living in a remote Idaho town called Fingerbone. The train that travels into the cold mountains of Fingerbone crosses a lake that has claimed the lives of Ruthie's grandfather by accident and her mother by suicide, leaving Ruthie and her younger sister Lucille with their grandmother, Sylvia Foster. When Sylvia passes away, her two sisters-in-law move to Fingerbone to take care of the girls. Though pleasant and dutiful, Misses Lily and Nona Foster enjoy their solitude. After the first hard winter, they leave Ruthie and Lucille in the hands of a younger guardian, the girls' aunt Sylvie, who returns home after sixteen years. Sylvie, their mother's younger sister, is a boxcar drifter content with her itinerant lifestyle, but she commits to staying in Fingerbone to keep house and raise the girls. She has little experience with either and becomes like a "mermaid in a ship's cabin." Most days, she wanders to the lake by the train tracks and drifts in a stolen rowboat. In a house soon covered in soot and cobwebs, cans and newspapers, she feeds the girls from jelly jars and plates made from detergent boxes. Ruthie takes it all in stride, but her sister, Lucille, sees the other children in town and wants no part of Sylvie's world. Whereas the sisters are inseparable through much of their young lives, they begin to grow apart in their teenage years. Lucille matures into a prissy woman who swings her hips and sews her own dresses; Ruthie remains a tall, gangly child with a buzzard's hunch and a distaste for school. Soon their lives, like the house and the town and their dark family history, get lost in the tangled overgrowth of loneliness and neglect. The family ties that have kept them together can hold them no more. In language as lyrical and lush as the landscapes it describes, Robinson tells a haunting story of the permanence of loss and the transitory nature of love. She reminds us that, despite the fragility of human relationships, our desires to hold onto them are what make us whole.

The awakening, and selected short stories by Kate Chopin ( Book )
18 editions published between 1899 and 2008 in English and held by 581 libraries worldwide
First published in 1899, this beautiful, brief novel so disturbed critics & the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read & admired, The Awakening has been hailed as an early vision of woman's emancipation. This sensuous book tells of a woman's abandonment of her family, her seduction, & her awakening to desires & passions that threatened to consumer her. Originally entitled "A Solitary Soul," this portrait of twenty-eight-year-old Edna Pontellier is a landmark in American fiction, rooted firmly in the romantic tradition of Herman Melville & Emily Dickinson. Here, a woman in search of self-discovery turns away from convention & society, & toward the primal, from convention & society, & toward the primal, irresistibly attracted to nature & the senses The Awakening, Kate Chopin's last novel, has been praised by Edmund Wilson as "beautifully written." And Willa Cather described its style as "exquisite," "sensitive," & "iridescent." This edition of The Awakening also includes a selection of short stories by Kate Chopin. "This seems to me a higher order of feminism than repeating the story of woman as victim ... Kate Chopin gives her female protagonist the central role, normally reserved for Man, in a meditation on identity & culture, consciousness & art."--The introduction by Marilynne Robinson.

Housekeeping ( Visual )
7 editions published between 1987 and 2011 in English and No Linguistic content and held by 219 libraries worldwide
Aunt Sylvie, an eccentric free spirit, returns to her hometown, a small mountain community in the Pacific Northwest, to care for her two orphaned nieces.

An introduction to Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson audio guide by Dan Stone ( Recording )
2 editions published in 2008 in English and held by 109 libraries worldwide