Jane Smiley

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A "powerful and poignant" twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear (The New York Times Book Review) that takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride—and centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. 
When the youngest daughter objects, she is cut out of his will. This...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres—and “one of her generation’s most eloquent chroniclers of ordinary familial love” (The New York Times)—comes a “masterly…compelling depiction of a singular woman,” (The New Yorker), from her childhood in post–Civil War Missouri to California in the throes of World War II. 

Here...

Family patriarch Walter Langdon has died, and his children have fanned out across the country. As the narrative moves year by year from 1953 to 1986, from post-World War II optimism through the landscape of the Cold War and the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and '70s, and then into the unprececented wealth--for some--of the early 1980s, the Langdon children each follow a different path in a changing world.

On her family's California horse ranch in the 1960s, eighth-grader Abby Lovitt faces the possibility of giving up her beloved colt, Jack, when it comes to light that his dam might have been stolen.

Soon after her yearling, Jack, begins working with professional trainers at a nearby ranch, Abby Lovitt takes responsibility for a very large, very smart, and very curious retired racehorse named Gee Whiz.

After a busy day at the beach Lucy's mom reads a bedtime story and Lucy falls asleep only to wake up alone in a dark, still room. How will she ever be able to get back to sleep?

The author celebrates the art of fiction as she looks at one hundred very different examples of the novel, ranging from the classics to little-known gems, and discusses the evolution of the novel and the practice of novel-writing.

Greed. Envy. Sex. Property. In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American obsessions with the expertise of a master carpenter. Forthright, likable Joe Stratford is the kind of local businessman everybody trusts, for good reason. But it's 1982, and even in Joe's small town, values are in upheaval: not just property values, either. Enter Marcus Burns, a would-be master of the universe whose years with...

Jane Smiley instantly captured the admiration and laughter of readers everywhere when Moo was published. A New York Times best- seller, it is a hilarious tour through the inner sanctums of a Midwestern university. Everyone at the large agricultural college dubbed Moo U. has an agenda. Whether it's massaging data, running secret experiments, or seducing the powerful, each person is dedicated to a plan. Meet Dr. Lionel Gift, who feels that his economic...