This image is the cover for the book Extreme Magic

Extreme Magic

The recognition of failure and success is the theme of these eight short stories and the title novella from three-time National Book Award finalist Hortense Calisher
Extreme Magic is Hortense Calisher’s third collection of shorter works, after In the Absence of Angels (1951) and Tale for the Mirror (1962). Follow a drifting husband as he returns home and finds middle age in “A Christmas Carillon.” Listen with a daughter as she overhears a painful argument between her parents in “The Gulf Between.” Travel with a broken man as he heals after a tragic loss in “Extreme Magic.” Once again, Calisher captivates with her expressionistic prose and intricate characters.

Hortense Calisher

Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties.A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.

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