This image is the cover for the book In the Absence of Angels

In the Absence of Angels

The debut short story collection that launched the career of one of the twentieth century’s most vivid writers, featuring the celebrated tale “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks”
In this captivating collection of fifteen short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker, Hortense Calisher’s lyrical prose captures the quotidian lives of individuals dealing with alienation, loneliness, and assimilation. Highly influenced by her own New York upbringing, Calisher brings an all-knowing and compassionate verve to these intimate stories.
The opening piece, “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks,” is an elegantly constructed tale of a man who becomes particularly introspective after dropping his loving but alcoholic mother off at a sanitarium. In “Heartburn,” Calisher deftly sketches a time and place through portraits of watering holes that resemble their own camaraderie-filled communities. The unforgettable title story captures the end of a love affair.
With her distinctive language and psychological clarity, Calisher meticulously builds truths through her characters and their understandings.  

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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