Merrill Joan Gerber

This is the poignant story of a loving, gentle man, "antique" by virtue, "an antique man" by profession. It is the story of his lingering death, of his transcendent courage, of the agony and solitude of those who must watch - his wife and two daughters. It is everyone's story in that it tells in specific and particular terms the general human experience of love and loss, suffering and death. It is agony redeemed by art. An Antique Man is also an extraordinary...

Anna in Chains is a collection of stories about the reality of being an elderly woman in the modern world and all the struggles that go with it. Anna Goldman, nearly eighty years old, widowed and living on her own in the Fairfax Area of Los Angeles, struggles to remain independent as she moves through the modern world. Jewish, but disenchanted with religion in any guise, Anna eats bacon to dare God's wrath. Living in a mixed ethnic neighborhood,...

Merrill Joan Gerber holds the record of having sold more short stories to Redbook Magazine than any other writer. This selection of twenty-five linked tales, published in Redbook from 1964 to 1991, chronicles the passionate (domestic) adventures of Janet, Danny and their three daughters.

This exceptional book of short stories, chosen for inclusion in the prestigious Illinois Short Fiction Series, contains Gerber's powerful tale "I Don't Believe This," which won an O. Henry Award.

Gerber heads to Florence with her husband, a history professor taking a group of students. She goes in nervous, not knowing any Italian, but gradually starts to learn her way around Florence and other cities in Italy.

Glimmering Girls tells the story of three extraordinary American women during a time of sexual and cultural repression. Francie and her friends Liz and Amanda are college students, coming of age intellectually, emotionally, and physically in a setting where men were forbidden entry to women's dorm rooms, and women were locked into those rooms after curfew. College life for women was governed by one simple, cardinal rule: Marry Before Graduation or...

In this powerful love story that takes place on a Turkish sailing vessel, Lily, a professor at a Florida college, finds herself required to be the companion of her newly widowed mother as they take a cruise along the Turkish coastline on a small sailing ketch. Expecting to endure, though not enjoy, this trip among her mother's friends, Lily instead finds herself falling in love with Izak, the charismatic Turkish captain of the boat, a man whose powers...

This shattering novel about wife and child abuse is a work of art that haunts the reader's memory. Merrill Joan Gerber reveals the love affair of Ginny and her sensitive but horribly destructive lover, Michael. The pair adopts a child that Michael both loves and abuses.

"These powerful essays share critical moments of a writer's life: scenes from sixty years of passionate married love; suicides faced and suicide contemplated; trauma at the DMV; a night lost searching for a harpsichord in the mountains of Florence, Italy; the tale of a beloved cousin whose plane is shot down by Japanese Zeros; and a precious friendship between two women writers derailed by the poisons of religion and politics. In the titular essay...