The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano -- the future dictator of Paraguay -- begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and ahorse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Asunción and reigns there as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's ill-fated imperial dream -- one fueled by a heedless arrogance that will devastate all of Paraguay.With the urgency of the narrative, rich and intimate detail, and a wealth of skillfully layered characters, The News from Paraguay recalls the epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

In an elegant and penetrating first short-story collection, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived, Lily Tuck's characters travel to unknown, exotic places and, while there, find themselves deeply immersed in observation — of the natives, the local customs, the foreign landscape — in an effort to discern some elemental truth about who they themselves are. Instead, these women meet with disorientation, confusion; they are disappointed by the people closest to them — lovers, husbands, family members. Finally, they arrive at the sometimes heartbreaking but ultimately optimistic realization that the answers they seek lie not in other people or places but within themselves. Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived is a brilliant collection from a writer of exceptional poise and insight.

Lily Tuck understands that emotional transformations cannot-and should not -- be easily explained. In her elegant and penetrating first collection, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived, Tuck offers a portrait of the subtle shifts that can render the accommodations we make to our lives or to our partners suddenly impossible. Tuck's characters are in the midst of a composed yet profound rebellion, the basis of which is a growing estrangement from the self, a need to return to some fundamental truth whose discovery, as often as not, will force significant change. These characters travel to unknown, exotic places, and, while there, find themselves deeply immersed in observation-of the natives of the locality, of the local customs, of the foreign landscape -- in an effort to discern some elemental truth about who they themselves are. Yet rather than see the self reflected back clear as rainwater, these women meet instead with disorientation, confusion; they are disappointed by the people closest to them -- lovers, husbands, members of their families. Tuck is a writer of such grace and understatement that one does not immediately recognize the piercing psychological acuity and deftness of her observations. Her characters are full of poignant yearning and guarded optimism, of unwavering honesty, even in the face of painful disappointment or physical chaos. It is the elements of pain and confusion that bring these women back to themselves in precisely the way they need to be; to the sometimes heartbreaking but finally optimistic realization that the answers they seek lie not in other people, or places, but rather within themselves. Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived is a brilliant collection from a writer of exceptional poise and insight. **

“Tuck is a genius."—Los Angeles Book ReviewLily Tuck has had a wonderful and accomplished career as a National Book Award winning novelist, story writer, essayist and biographer. She is one of our most distinguished contributors to American literature. With The Double Life of Liliane, Tuck writes what may well be her crowning achievement to date, and, significantly too, her most autobiographical work. ??As the child of a German movie producer father who lives in Italy and a beautiful, artistically talented mother who resides in New York, Liliane's life is divided between those two very different worlds. A shy and observant only child with a vivid imagination, Liliane uncovers the stories of family members as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Mary Queen of Scots and an early Mexican adventurer, and pieces together their vivid histories, through both World Wars and across continents. ? What unfolds is an astonishing and riveting...

“Tuck is a genius”—Los Angeles TimesWinner of the National Book Award, Lily Tuck follows her critically-acclaimed novel I Married You For Happiness with an elegantly constructed story collection about lives tethered to the past and the unexpected encounters that threaten to unmoor them. The House at Belle Fontaine is at once unexpected and familiar, and wholly memorable for its spare depiction of characters on the brink of transformation.The powerfully intimate stories within The House at Belle Fontaine span the better part of the twentieth century and almost every continent, laying bare apprehensions, passions, secrets, and tragedies that resonate across time and space. In crisp, spare, and penetrating prose, Lily Tuck unveils and suppresses personal truths as her characters navigate exotic locales and immediate emotional territory: an artist learns that her deceased ex-husband had an especially illicit affair seventeen...

The first biography in any language of one of the most celebrated Italian writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1912 to an unconventional family of modest means, Elsa Morante grew up with an independent spirit, a formidable will, and an unshakable commitment to writing. Forced to hide from the Fascists during World War II in a remote mountain hut with her husband, renowned author Alberto Moravia, she re-emerged at war's end to take her place among the premier Italian writers of her day. When Rome was film capital of the world, she counted Pasolini, Visconti, and the young Bertolucci among her circle of friends. She was charismatic, beautiful, and fiercely intelligent; her marriage, a passionate union of literary giants, captivated a nation; her love affairs were intense and often tragic. And until now few Americans have known of this remarkable woman and her powerful, original talent. **From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Novelist Elsa Morante and the city she symbolized come alive in this warm, sprightly literary biography. Novelist Tuck (The News from Paraguay) surveys Morante's life: her troubled relationship with an unstable mother; her salad days writing magazine pieces along with having to occasionally resort to prostitution to make a living; World War II, when she and husband, Alberto Moravia, both half-Jewish, hid out from Fascist persecution in a mountain village; her postwar dolce vita immersed in friendships, affairs and dinner-table debates with Rome's glitterati. Morante emerges as a complex, vibrant character—difficult, mercurial and fiercely (often rudely) devoted to truth-telling, but also kindhearted and charismatic. Tuck ties the biographical details—and analyses of her subject's dreams and handwriting—to sympathetic but critical analyses of Morante's protean works, which include the hothouse melodrama of House of Liars, the darkly beguiling Huckleberry Finn fable of Arturo's Island and the pitiless meditation on force and corruption of her bestselling History. Tuck sets the life in a colorful evocation of Morante's milieu, enlivened by her own youthful reminiscences of Italy's postwar film scene, that makes the book a love letter to Rome as well as to her subject. Photos. (July 29) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Starred Review Tuck resurrects the life, times, and career of Elsa Morante, an important writer in post–World War II Italy, author of  four novels: House of Liars (1948), Arturo’s Island (1957), History (1974), and Aracoeli (1982). Morante was a major participant in Italy’s cultural flowering of the postwar era. She knew other famous Italian writers (and was married to one, Alberto Moravia), as well as many famous filmmakers, including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luchino Visconti. Born in Rome into a family of modest means, Morante had an early life that boasted only a small degree of material comfort; she moved away from home to support herself at a far younger age than was socially accepted at the time. During World War II, she and Moravia found it necessary to flee Rome and hide from the Fascists in a mountain hut. Morante experienced many love affairs over the years, though only fleeting happiness was gained from each one; but all the while, she was devoting herself to writing and to drawing richness from her wide exposure to life. Written with a charming personal touch (Tuck herself has spent considerable time in Rome) that warms the narrative to a fine glow, this is a vital biography bringing to American audiences a writer most will have previously known little about. See the Story behind the Story for more information on Tuck and the writing of this book. --Brad Hooper

“His hand is growing cold, still she holds it,” is how this riveting, deeply moving story of a forty-three year old marriage by National Book Award winner Lily Tuck begins. Unfolding over a single night, Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Too shocked yet to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long marriage, beginning with their first meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a highly accomplished mathematician—it was a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love.Slender, powerful, and utterly engaging, I Married You For Happiness is not only an elegant elegy to a man and a marriage, but also a meditation on the theory of probability and how chance can affect both a life and one’s consideration of an afterlife.ReviewA Best Book of the Year:Boston GlobeChicago TribuneNational PostPublishers Weekly"One of the most beautiful love songs in novel form you'll ever read . . . Tuck is a genius with moments . . . Her ability to capture beauty will remind readers of Margaret Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras."—Los Angeles Book Review"[A] moving narrative . . . Poetic and absorbing . . . The final passages, as dawn breaks in thie new widow's life, as re a rare and elegant affirmation of the transcendence of love."—The Daily Beast"Beautiful . . . Tuck produces spare prose that doesn't sacrifice tension or emotion in its economy. . . . An artfully crafted still life of one couple's marraige." —Boston Globe"Sweet, tender and compelling."—Chicago Tribune (Best Books of the Year)"This slim brush of a book manages to accomplish in a mere 200-plus pages what many novelists try to do in twice the verbiage. . . . Examines the disguises and surprises that energize a lasting marriage." —The Seattle Times"An elegant vigil . . . A poised, readable, immediate novel."—The Guardian"Luminous . . . Spare but deep." —NPR"A magical, truthful tale." —Huffington Post (Best Upcoming Books for Fall)"Captivating . . . Absorbing . . . Strikes a chord."—The Washington Post"Fearless and absorbing . . . What Tuck has captured so deftly is the essence of a bereaved wandering mind, with its detours and tangents. . . . Intense, brutal, and stunning." —The Portland Press Herald"The writing is lyrical and striking, vividly capturing the nature of memory and the way in which love, though never simple, is contained and proven in the small, indelible moments of our lives. . . . This slim, magnificent novel is rarefied by its heartbreaking immediacy, and the moving, aching stream of consciousness chronicles not only the psychology of shock and mourning, but also the minute-by-minute way in which Nine begins to put life as she knows it in the past tense." —BookPage“A breathlessly mannered, affecting new work . . . Small, vital snapshots make up two lives closely shared, and beautifully portrayed in this triumph of a novel."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)"A tender look at marriage, mathematics, life and death, and the intricacies of love . . . I Married You for Happiness elegiac and joyful simultaneously—a love letter to this marriage and to the idea of marriage in general." —Book Browse"Tuck's crisp writing is a joy."—Kirkus Reviews"A full and satisfying potrayal of a marriage . . . Great fodder for readers who enjoy pondering life's larger questions.”—Library Journal"Affecting, original . . . Rich in sentiment, poignancy, and honesty."—Booklist"Tuck is an elegant, spare writer who limns her characters in a few swift sentences. . . . Her ability to work mathematical concepts into a literary novel is impressive. . . . For the unmarried, I Married You for Happiness will do what great fiction does: draw you into another's life, allowing you to inhabit it vicariously, emerging with an increased understanding of something previously unknown. If you are happily married, your worst fears about your spouse predeceasing you will be miserably, brightly illuminated, the better you may see them in the harshly brilliant light of quality fiction." —PopMattersAbout the AuthorBorn in Paris, Lily Tuck is the author of four previous novels: Interviewing Matisse or the Woman Who Died Standing Up, The Woman Who Walked on Water, Siam, or the Woman Who Shot a Man, which was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and The News From Paraguay, winner of the National Book Award. She is also the author of the biography, Woman of Rome, A Life of Elsa Morante. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and are collected in Limbo, or Other Places I Have Lived. She divides her time between Maine and New York City.

In an elegant and penetrating first short-story collection, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived, Lily Tuck's characters travel to unknown, exotic places and, while there, find themselves deeply immersed in observation -- of the natives, the local customs, the foreign landscape -- in an effort to discern some elemental truth about who they themselves are. Instead, these women meet with disorientation, confusion; they are disappointed by the people closest to them -- lovers, husbands, family members. Finally, they arrive at the sometimes heartbreaking but ultimately optimistic realization that the answers they seek lie not in other people or places but within themselves. Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived is a brilliant collection from a writer of exceptional poise and insight.

Elsa Morante was born in 1912 to an unconventional family of modest means. She grew up with an independent spirit, a formidable will, and a commitment to writing—she wrote her first poem when she was just two years old. During World War II, Morante and her husband, the celebrated writer Alberto Moravia, were forced to flee occupied Rome—Moravia was half-Jewish (as was she) and wanted by the Fascists—and hide out in a remote mountain hut. After the war, Morante published a series of prize-winning novels, including Arturo's Island and History, a seminal account of the war, which established her as one of the leading Italian writers of her day. Lily Tuck's elegant and unusual biography also evokes the heady time during the postwar years when Rome was the film capital of the world and Morante's counted among her circle of friends the filmmakers Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, and the young Bernardo Bertolucci. A charismatic and beautiful woman, Morante had a series of love affairs—most unhappy—as well as friendships with such famous literary luminaries as Carlo Levi, Italo Calvino, and Natalia Ginzburg. As a couple, Morante and Moravia—the Beauvoir-Sartre of Italy—captivated the nation with their intense and mutual admiration, their arguments, and their passion. Wonderfully researched with the cooperation of the Morante Estate, filled with personal interviews, and written in graceful and succinct prose, Woman of Rome introduces the American reader to a woman of fierce intelligence, powerful imagination, and original talent.

Lily, Molly, and Inez are women of a certain age, of a certain bearing, of a certain class. Late one dire night, Molly telephones from Connecticut to catch Lily up with the news: Inez's corpse -- near-naked but wearing boots -- has been discovered propped up "like a broom" in a corner of her Soho loft. It is an occasion ripe for an all-night heart-to-heart conversation, bouncing deliriously from one evasion to the next -- until the pair of talk-crazy, talk-weary women have successfully diverted themselves with all the wonderfully vagrant stuff of life . . . with everything, in fact, except grief.