The Elizabeth Stories

Loosely connected tales of growing up in a Canadian town.

Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such asPartisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—in which it originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick’s short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl’s boyfriend is not quite good enough, his “silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand.” A magazine editor’s life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick’s beautiful and razor-sharp prose.

The harrowing true story of abduction and survival from the courageous young woman who lived it—now the subject of a Lifetime original movie, I Am Elizabeth Smart. In this memoir, Elizabeth Smart reveals how she survived and the secret to forging a new life in the wake of a brutal crime. On June 5, 2002, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart, the daughter of a close-knit Mormon family, was taken from her home in the middle of the night by religious fanatic Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee. Elizabeth was kept chained, dressed in disguise, repeatedly raped, and told she and her family would be killed if she tried to escape. After her rescue on March 12, 2003, she rejoined her family and worked to pick up the pieces of her life. With My Story, Elizabeth tells of the constant fear she endured every hour, her courageous determination to maintain hope, and how she devised a plan to manipulate her captors and convinced them to return to Utah, where she was rescued minutes after arriving. Smart explains how her faith helped her stay sane in the midst of a nightmare and how she found the strength to confront her captors at their trial and see that justice was served. In the years after her rescue, Smart transformed from victim to advocate, traveling the country and working to educate, inspire and foster change. She has created a foundation to help prevent crimes against children and is a frequent public speaker. She and her husband, Matthew Gilmour, now have two children.

Elizabeth Grant has stood at the helm of her beauty empire for more than sixty years, regaling admirers with personal stories, notably one event that nearly killed her. When a German rocket dropped soundlessly from the sky on a peaceful Sunday in wartime London, its impact and resultant bomb blast damage took her down, damaged her face and rendered her almost deaf in one ear. A young makeup artist at Ellstree Studios, she thought herself so repulsively scarred, she could no longer face acting luminaries like Vivien Leigh, Margaret Leighton, and Robert Taylor with any degree of confidence. "I honestly thought my life was over," Elizabeth says. But as readers will learn, she easily has more than nine lives. From that misfortune came salvation. With Elizabeth you will sense a wealth of wisdom and experience lurking beneath her self-deprecating wit. A more profound history - one that had lain hidden for decades - was waiting to be unearthed. Revealing the multiple sides of Elizabeth was a painstaking labour of love, and one of our most rewarding journeys. Little by little, she emerged from self-imposed shadows with shocking and disturbing accounts of her nightmarish childhood. Years of abuse and neglect had spawned crushing self-doubt, yet she soldiered on, nursing a remarkable will to survive at any cost - even daring to reach for the unreachable. The Elizabeth Grant story spins a cinematic voyage on three continents, through Heaven and Hell. Compelling, tragic, wistful and humourous, it charts a unique woman's determination to overcome every boulder in her path. Her survival is a raw and powerful testament to human perseverance and her ultimate success provides inspiration that transcends time.

What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers? Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories—stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence. Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too—when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human. Lesser has walked two main paths in her life—the spiritual path and the feminist one—paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The bestselling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate. Brilliantly structured into three distinct parts, Part One explores how history is carried forward through the stories a culture tells and values, and what we can do to balance the scales. Part Two looks at women and power and expands what it means to be courageous, daring, and strong. And Part Three offers “A Toolbox for Inner Strength.” Lesser argues that change in the culture starts with inner change, and that no one—woman or man—is immune to the corrupting influence of power. She provides inner tools to help us be both strong-willed and kind-hearted. Cassandra Speaks is a beautifully balanced synthesis of storytelling, memoir, and cultural observation. Women, men and all people will find themselves in the pages of this book, and will come away strengthened, opened, and ready to work together to create a better world for all people.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “An extraordinary short story collection that deserves our closest attention.”—Detroit Free Press “Elizabeth Berg’s gift as a storyteller lies most powerfully in her ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the remarkable in the everyday.”—The Boston Globe In this superb collection of short stories, Elizabeth Berg takes us into pivotal moments in the lives of women, when memories and events come together to create a sense of coherence, understanding, and change. In “Ordinary Life,” Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, shutting out her husband and the realities of their life together—and no, she isn't contemplating a divorce. She just needs some time to think, take stock of her life, and to arrive, finally, at a surprising conclusion. In “White Dwarf” and “Martin's Letter to Nan,” the secrets of a marriage are revealed with sensitivity and “brilliant insights about the human condition” (Detroit Free Press) that have become trademark of Berg's writing. The Charlotte Observer has said, “Berg captures the way women think as well as any writer.” Those qualities of wisdom and perception are everywhere present in Ordinary Life.

This riveting inside story of the intense search for the Salt Lake City teenager reveals never-before-told details of the largest investigation in Utah state history. The firsthand account of Tom Smart, Elizabeth's uncle and one-time suspect, reveals the details of the flawed police investigation, the media's manipulation of the family, and the eyewitness account of nine-year-old Mary Katherine Smart that went largely ignored by investigators. New research is presented on the family background of disturbed street preacher Brian David Mitchell, who kidnapped Elizabeth as part of a bizarre polygamous plot. Also examined is the critical role of the media, revealing the essential part played by John Walsh and others in facilitating Elizabeth's safe return, and the manipulative influence of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly. Going beyond a mere eyewitness account, the book includes information culled from interviews with more than 150 people involved in the search and investigation, notes from family meetings, and memos from law enforcement officials.