On January 30, 2024, Ellen Gilchrist passed away at the age of 88. The Southern writer did not begin her career until later in life—as she put it in her essay collection The Writing Life, "To tell the truth I was 40 years old before I had enough experience of life to be a writer. I barely knew what I thought, much less what anything meant.”
Gilchrist's first story collection, “In the Land of Dreamy Dreams,” was published in 1981, when she was 46. It was met with instant success, selling more than 10,000 copies in its first 10 months and earning critical acclaim.
In 1984, Gilchrist won the National Book Award for her story collection “Victory Over Japan.”
Gilchrist's writing was surely shaped in part by fellow Southern writer Eudora Welty, with whom she studied at Millsaps College during the 1960s. Like Welty, Gilchrist excelled in writing taut dialogue which revealed subtle differences in class. According to her son, Pierre Gautier Walker III, her strongest characters were "women trying to break out of the framework of the 1950s and 1960s.”
Ellen Gilchrist Books
Drunk with Love
“There is not a single dud in this brilliant collection…crisp stories about marriage, blood, booze and death and the wayward passions fomented by them.”—Time Out
From joyous moments to near insurmountable grief, National Book Award-winning author Ellen Gilchrist gives readers vignettes revealing the lives of some of her most memorable characters. In “Traceleen at Dawn,” we see the wealthy Miss Crystal finally give up drinking after a fire consumes her home. In “1941,” readers meet Rhoda Manning, a precocious nine-year-old facing off with the world of adults for the first time. In “The Last Diet,” a woman on a diet crashes her car into a doughnut shop. And murder takes center stage in “Memphis” and “The Emancipator.” Coming of age, heartbreak, death, and more permeate these brilliant snapshots of life from the author of the award-winning Victory over Japan, Acts of God, and other acclaimed works.
Falling Through Space
Now, with this collection of essays, readers can explore the author of Victory Over Japan throughout her career. From the Mississippi plantation of her childhood to pieces featured in Vogue, Outside, New Woman, and The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, Gilchrist comes alive.
With more than forty pictures, essays about Gilchrist’s thoughts on writing, and a peek into the books, teachers, and artists that influenced her work, this is required reading for any fan.
Flights of Angels
The National Book Award–winning Southern author humorously explores themes of marriage, love, gender, race, age, and more in eighteen short stories.
Unplanned pregnancy, born-again Christianity, and strained sibling relationships are explored through precocious sixteen-year-old narrator Aurora Harris in “The Triumph of Reason,” “Have a Wonderful Nice Walk,” and “Witness to the Crucifixion.” Crystal and her housekeeper Traceleen feel the straining of family ties and the force of chauvinism in “Miss Crystal Confronts the Past” and “A Sordid Tale.”
Hope, laughter, and love balance tragedy in this must-read for die-hard Gilchrist fans.
I Cannot Get You Close Enough
Three intertwining novellas about love, death, and the bonds of blood: “To say that Ellen Gilchrist can write is to say that Placido Domingo can sing.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
Journeying through the lives of different members of the Hand family, Ellen Gilchrist weaves together tumultuous relationships that are bound by blood. A harrowing custody battle leads Anna Hand to Istanbul and back to ensure once and for all that her niece is safe from her conniving mother’s ploys. Jessie, finally free from her mother’s influence, has her life upended when Olivia, the sister she never knew she had, appears at the Hands’ home. Between this and the shocking loss of her aunt, Jessie doesn’t know if her resentment of Olivia comes from their chaotic meeting or something suspicious bubbling just beneath Olivia’s surface.
Meanwhile Olivia, the half-Native American child who had never known a normal family, must cope with this new world of high society. Losing Anna, and having a dark and desperate secret exposed, may send her back to Tahlequah—if it doesn’t send her over the edge first.
And Anna, leaving a legacy of literature in her wake, may do more harm in death than she ever wanted in life, as her sister enters a vicious fight to recover her lost writing…
Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle
Fiction from a National Book Award-winning author and “short-story writer of substantial gifts and reputation” (The New York Times).
From National Book Award Winner Ellen Gilchrist, a pillar of Southern literature hailed by the Washington Post as “a national treasure,” comes a colorful collection of short stories integrating favorite characters with captivating newcomers. Rhoda’s reveling in her childhood and infinite possibility in “The Tree Fort” and “The Time Capsule” is juxtaposed with her darker adulthood in “Mexico.” Nora Jane returns alongside Lin Tan Sing, a Chinese medical student and geneticist who predicts the birth of her twins. Fans of Gilchrist won’t want to miss the author’s exploration of the many stages of life—and the lightness and darkness each can bring.
Rhoda
A fiction collection, including two new stories, from the award-winning author: “Rhoda is a fully realized creation. And not one to be dismissed lightly.”—Entertainment Weekly
From Ellen Gilchrist, a National Book Award winner and “national treasure” (The Washington Post), this volume includes twenty-three stories starring Rhoda Manning—“the shining manifestation of Gilchrist’s wry, intelligent, and passionate writing” (Kirkus Review).
Follow Rhoda from age eight to age sixty, as she grows from a hot-tempered, impetuous child to a complex, confident adult. Even at a young age, Rhoda loves to get her way, boasting a unique spark that only shines brighter in an adulthood full of sex and excitement. From diet pills to multiple marriages to far-reaching travels and a writing career, Rhoda’s relentless hunger for adventure will delight all who accompany her on her journeys.
Starcarbon
Three couples struggle through tricky relationships in a novel “shot through with an offhand lyricism, snippets of wisdom, and a ready humor” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer).
After her first year in college, Olivia de Havilland Hand returns home to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, amid tornadoes and the chance for rekindled love. Meanwhile, in New Orleans, her half-sister Jessie tries to keep her new marriage to immature King afloat as she plans for the arrival of their first child. The sisters’ lives intertwine with others as their father fears losing his two daughters, and Olivia’s anthropology professor has a tumultuous affair with a fellow academic. An interconnected web of relationships thrives against the backdrop of a world in transition in this literary rumination on the joys and sorrows of family and love from the National Book Award-winning author.
The Anna Papers
A writer’s suicide sends ripples through the world she left behind: “A wonderful book…moving and tender and tough and unsentimental, all at the same time.”—Chicago Tribune
An accomplished author with a string of devoted lovers, Anna Hand savors life in all of its bittersweet, fleeting moments. So when she gets a letter and discovers her brother has a daughter he never knew about, she sees a major part of life that has passed her by: a child to love. Desperate to unite this young girl with her father, Anna moves back to Charlotte, North Carolina, to rediscover her family and convince him to accept her.
Caught between the politics of her upper-crust family and love for a married man, Anna finds her health in serious danger. When her bad days catch up with her good ones, she must finally face the disease that had been hiding just beneath the surface. Not willing to resign herself to months of aggressive treatment, and knowing the outcome will be the same regardless, she takes matters into her own hands, and surrenders her body to the sea.
But it isn't only Anna's death that shocks her family. The papers she left behind may lead her sister Helen to discover more about Anna than she, or any of the Hand family, need to know…
