Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy takes readers on a captivating journey to one of the world's most beloved cities Mary McCarthy brings her novelist's unerring eye to a book that blends art, politics, religion, music, and history to create a living portrait of "the world's loveliest city." Like a painter capturing the city's essence on canvas, McCarthy uses words to create stunning visuals that bring both the old and new Venice to enchanting life. From her apartment...

Mary McCarthy, one of our most brilliant and beloved authors, serves up wit, insight, and her unique worldview in this diverse collection of essays In provocatively titled pieces such as "The Contagion of Ideas," "Tyranny of the Orgasm," and "No News, or, What Killed the Dog," Mary McCarthy expresses her frank, unflinching, often contrarian point of view. Nothing-and no one-is safe from her merciless writer's eye-from politics to the ever-changing...

A vicious and brilliant satire of human vanity from the author of the classic bestseller The Group
Long out of print, Mary McCarthy's second novel is a bitingly funny satire set in the early years of the Cold War about a group of writers, editors, and intellectuals who retreat to rural New England to found a hilltop utopia. With this group loosely divided into two factions—purists, led by the libertarian editor Macdougal Macdermott,...

From Madame Bovary to Macbeth, this collection by Mary McCarthy offers surprising revelations about some of the world's most beloved works Shakespeare, Nabokov, Orwell, and Burroughs are just a few of the literary immortals featured in this engaging and thought-provoking volume. In one remarkable essay, McCarthy provides a lively discourse on the true nature of evil in Shakespeare's plays. Focusing on the character of Macbeth, she reveals why Lady...

Tracing her moral struggles to the day she accidentally took a sip of water before her Communion-a mortal sin-Mary McCarthy gives us eight funny and heartrending essays about the illusive and redemptive nature of memory "During the course of writing this, I've often wished that I were writing fiction." Originally published in large part as standalone essays in the New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar, Mary McCarthy's acclaimed memoir begins with her...

A special edition bringing together three powerful memoirs by bestselling author Mary McCarthy In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy begins with her recollections of a happy childhood cut tragically short by the death of her parents during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Tempering memory with invention, McCarthy describes how, orphaned at six, she spent much of her childhood shuttled between two sets of grandparents and three religions-Catholic,...

A riveting and unconventional thriller about a motley group of airplane passengers taken hostage by militant hijackers En route to Iran, a plane is captured by Middle Eastern terrorists intent on holding hostage the committee of politicians, religious leaders, and activists on a mission to investigate alleged human rights violations by the shah. But the kidnappers soon discover that there is a greater treasure onboard. Among the passengers are prominent...

A college instructor embarks on a fanatical quest to save his job-and enact righteous revenge-in this brilliantly acerbic satire of university politics during the early Cold War years Henry Mulcahy's future is in question. An instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, an institute of higher learning renowned for its progressive approach to education, he has just received word that he will not be teaching next semester. He strongly suspects that...

The life of a writer is flipped upside down when she reconnects with her roots-and her remarried ex-husband-in this witty autobiographical novel by bestselling author Mary McCarthy Former actress and budding playwright Martha Sinnott longs to return to the New Leeds artists' colony and the "charmed life" she abandoned when she divorced her first husband. Now remarried, she has come back to the New England artistic "utopia" with her current spouse...

In this eye-opening book, Mary McCarthy shares her love of the novel and her fear that it is becoming an endangered literary species "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it." So begins Mary McCarthy's fascinating critical analysis of the novel (and its practitioners) from her double-edged perspective as both reader and writer. The bestselling author of The Group takes T. S. Eliot's quote about Henry James, written in 1918, as a jumping-off...