Andrea Barrett

"A masterful new collection of interconnected stories, from the renowned National Book Award-winning author. In Natural History, Andrea Barrett completes the beautiful arc of intertwined lives of a family of scientists, teachers, and innovators that she has been weaving through multiple books since her National Book Award-winning collection, Ship Fever. The six exquisite stories in Natural History are set largely in a small community in central New...

The 1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction from "genius-enchantress" (Karen Russell) Andrea Barrett that introduces the characters of Barrett's vividly imagined world. The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory...

Ranging across two centuries, and from the western Himalaya to an Adirondack village, these wonderfully imagined stories and novellas travel the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery. A mapper of the highest mountain peaks realizes his true obsession. A young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with a romantic fantasy. Brothers and sisters, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion....

The coming apart of what we've come to call the "intact nuclear family" is by now, at the end of the 1980s, familiar territory. But in this passionate and impressive debut we travel where we've never been before--into a world that has no name. What can we call the sum total of these strange recombined patterns of stepparents, half sisters, and understandings that spring up between ex-wives? No one like Benjamin Day has come close to Penny Webb's...