Bøker av Mona Simpson

A masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother's collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s.When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from LA to college, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who believes that her children can attain all the things she hasn't, she's worked hard to secure their future. But when she enters hospital, her closest friend must keep the children safe and their mother's dreams for them alive.At Berkeley, Walter discovers a passion for architecture just as he realises his life as a student may end for lack of funds. Back home in LA, his sister Lina works in an ice-cream parlour while her wealthy classmates prepare for Ivy league schools, as she wages a high-stakes gamble to go there with them. And Donny, the little brother everybody loves, begins to drift towards a life on the beach, where he falls into an escalating relationship with drugs.A resonant story about family, duty, and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, it honours the spirit of imperfect mothers, and the under-chronicled significance of friends. With Commitment, Mona Simpson has written her most important and unforgettable novel.'Few novelists write about America as Mona Simpson does, with her acute understanding of the tension between external forces - economy, technology, society - and individual dreams, between nostalgia and the future, between yearning and deception. Commitment is a majestic novel about an American family and an American century, its vision and scope bringing to mind the work of Tolstoy, Stendahl, and Balzac'Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

A NEW YORKER AND LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother’s collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s.“A sweeping family epic that took me from one American coast to another…Simpson is so attuned to the family heart.” —Weike Wang, author of Joan Is OkayWhen Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from Los Angeles to college at UC Berkeley, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who maintains a wishful belief that her children can attain all the things she hasn’t, she’s worked hard to secure their future in caste-driven 1980s Los Angeles, gaining them illegal entry to an affluent public school. When she enters a state hospital, her closest friend tries to keep the children safe and their mother’s dreams for them alive.At Berkeley, Walter discovers a passion for architecture just as he realizes his life as a student may need to end for lack of funds. Back home in LA, his sister, Lina, who works in an ice-cream parlor while her wealthy classmates are preparing for Ivy league schools, wages a high stakes gamble to go there with them. And Donny, the little brother everybody loves, begins to hide in plain sight, coding, gaming, and drifting towards a life on the beach, where he falls into an escalating relationship with drugs.Moving from Berkeley and Los Angeles to New York and back again, this is a story about one family trying to navigate the crisis of their lives, a crisis many know first-hand in their own families or in those of their neighbors. A resonant novel about family and duty and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, Commitment honors the spirit of fragile, imperfect mothers and the under-chronicled significance of friends, in determining the lives of our children left on their own. With Commitment, Mona Simpson, one of the foremost chroniclers of the American family in our time, has written her most important and unforgettable novel.

When an eavesdropping boy sets out to discover the obscure mysteries of his unravelling family, he uncovers instead what he least wants to know: the workings of his parents private lives. And even then he can't stop snooping.Miles Adler-Rich spies and listens in on his separating parents with the help of his friend Hector. The boys amateur detective work starts innocently enough. But in rifling through his mother s dresser and snooping in her online diary, it isn t long before they stumble into the outer reaches of the grown-up s privacy uncovering powerful information that will affect the family s health, wealth and sanity. Written with pathos and brilliant imagination, Casebook is an unflinching and very different coming-of-age story from one of America s most gifted chroniclers of modern family life.

The first monograph of Norma I. Quintana's photography; Circus. A Traveling Life, chronicles her decade-long collaboration with an American, travelling one-ring circus. Resulting in a loving history of extended families and a glance at another way of living in this world.

A wonderfully provocative and appealing novel, from the much-loved author of Anywhere But Here, her first in ten years. It tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can follow his passion for writing television comedy. Suddenly the marriage-once a genuine 50/50 arrangement-changes, with Paul working long hours and Claire left at home with a baby, William, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for. Lola, a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who is working in America to pay for her own children's higher education back in the Philippines, becomes their nanny. Lola stabilizes the rocky household and soon other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with Claire and "e;Williamo"e; remains her own closely guarded secret.In a novel at turns satirical and heartbreaking, where mothers' modern ideas are given practical overhauls by nannies, we meet Lola's vast network of fellow caregivers, each with her own story to tell. We see the upstairs competition for the best nanny and the downstairs competition for the best deal, and are forced to ask whether it is possible to buy love for our children and what that transaction costs us all.