This family history centered around three women from three generations spans the Civil War through the Jazz Age. Fans of Sallie Bingham's work will especially appreciate her parents Mary and Barry's romance that unfolds in letters and finally results in marriage. Bingham beautifully demonstrates an inheritance of emotion, morality, ideology, and most lasting of all, irreverence. Sallie Bingham has published four short story collections, four novels, a memoir, and several plays. Bingham was a director of the National Book Critics Circle, and founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Sallie Bingham Archive for Women's Papers and Culture at Duke University.
This rich and accomplished collection showcases the range of a writer at the height of her powers. From the complex stories of artistic influence and the exhilaration and fright of solitude, to the incendiary rage of a betrayed young wife who sacrifices everything for revenge, to the struggles for independence of the three women who surrounded Ezra Pound like subservient stars, these fictions seize the reader's attention while slashing stereotypes. This Sallie Bingham Reader captures the spirit of the author’s illustrious writing career via short stories, a novella, and a play.
Men who inherit great wealth are respected, but women who do the same are ridiculed. In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham rescues Doris Duke from this gendered prison and shows us just how brave, rebellious, and creative this unique woman really was, and how her generosity benefits us to this day.” —Gloria Steinem A bold portrait of Doris Duke, the defiant and notorious tobacco heiress who was perhaps the greatest modern woman philanthropist In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham chronicles one of the great underexplored lives of the twentieth century and the very archetype of the modern woman. “Don’t touch that girl, she’ll burn your fingers,” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover once said about Doris Duke, the inheritor of James Buchanan Duke’s billion-dollar tobacco fortune. During her lifetime, she would be blamed for scorching many, including her mother and various ex-lovers. She established her first foundation when she was twenty-one; cultivated friendships with the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Imelda Marcos, and Michael Jackson; flaunted interracial relationships; and adopted a thirty-two year-old woman she believed to be the reincarnation of her deceased daughter. This is also the story of the great houses she inhabited, including the classically proportioned limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue, the sprawling Duke Farms in New Jersey, the Gilded Age mansion Rough Point in Newport, Shangri La in Honolulu, and Falcon’s Lair overlooking Beverly Hills. Even though Duke was the subject of constant scrutiny, little beyond the tabloid accounts of her behavior has been publicly known. In 2012, when eight hundred linear feet of her personal papers were made available, Sallie Bingham set out to probe her identity. She found an alluring woman whose life was forged in the Jazz Age, who was not only an early war correspondent but also an environmentalist, a surfer, a collector of Islamic art, a savvy businesswoman who tripled her father’s fortune, and a major philanthropist with wide-ranging passions from dance to historic preservation to human rights. In The Silver Swan, Bingham is especially interested in dissecting the stereotypes that have defined Duke’s story while also confronting the disturbing questions that cleave to her legacy.
A woman’s obsession drives an affair out of control, violating social contracts and devastating the people in its path. For years, Ann and David shared weekends and holidays with country friends Flora and Edwin, even after womanizing Edwin took Ann away to pick grapes and started a year-long affair. The ground rules were clear from the start: Flora accepted what she called Edwin’s meaningless “things,” and Edwin stipulated no divorces. But Ann’s empty marriage (to which David was providing neither money nor sex) and growing need for Edwin causes her to ask for more, leading to estrangement and a startling climax.
A member of the moneyed Bingham family recounts her family's rise to power over several decades and their subsequent downfall amidst family infighting and rumors of a family murder
Readers familiar with Sallie Bingham's 1989 memoir, Passion and Prejudice, will remember her provocative chronicle of the Bingham family saga, cited by Gloria Steinem as "a major step toward feminist change and democracy." In Little Brother, she reflects on just one of her siblings: the youngest son Jonathan and his all-too brief life. The book begins with a count she calls her "dreadful list" of nine close relatives who died by accident, suicide, overdose, exposure to the elements, and electrocution, all before the age of 50. Jonathan was only twenty-two years old when he climbed a pole, hoping to rig up some lighting for a barn party and, by some fluke, grabbed a live wire. But even before his fatal fall to the ground, the boy suffered from insecurity, isolation, and difficulty relating to his large family. Bingham draws from archived material, chief among them the young man's journal and letters. She writes his short history with obvious affection and tenderness, along with more than a dash of survival guilt. Little Brother is a moving and honest new work.
Late in life, Melanie decides to pursue a dream her husband opposes: she will become a skilled ballroom dancer. She persists, entering the glamorous, demanding world of professional dancing with an innocence and a determination that will change her life.
Cory is a middle-aged Easterner, long-divorced, energetic and fearlessly sensual. Pursuing a dream she has nursed for years, she moves to Taos, New Mexico and buys a famous old house and, in the tradition of its previous owner, turns it into a crucible for the transformation of her guests. Eccentric and charming, with a lover from the Pueblo and lots of turquoise and broomstick skirts, Cory finds her guests, mainly skiers and tourists, bewildered by her particular philosophy, which she calls "The School of As-If." Then her long-time friend is found murdered and Cory is suspicious of the local police's half-hearted attempts to find the murderer. Involving herself in trying to solve the case, her unleashed power leads to surprising and even terrifying results. Part murder mystery, part adventure, this ground-breaking novel traces the mature lives of Cory and her much more conventional sister Apple, who first appeared in the author's "Matron of Honor," described by "Publishers Weekly" as "A powerful novel, her best yet." SALLIE BINGHAM's first novel was published shortly after she graduated from Radcliffe, followed by five more novels and three collections of short stories celebrating the lives of women. This latest, "Cory's Feast," continues to spotlight adventurous women whose challenges and choices illustrate the social changes of the twenty-first century. Her short stories and poetry have been widely published and her plays have been produced both off-Broadway and around the country. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center, and is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for women.
A dozen “vibrant . . . strikingly perceptive” stories about love—romantic, familial, comedic, and tragic, by the celebrated novelist and playwright (Booklist). Crossing a range of landscapes and eras, spanning age and gender, and circling taboos with a sly wit, “these 12 luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. There is not a false note in Bingham’s striking collection” (Publishers Weekly). In “A Gift for Burning” a woman regrets wasting all her energy on getting married, getting unmarried, and getting married again; “That Winter” introduces us to a woman writer in a Colorado cabin, isolated by the brutal weather, and liberated by a mysterious guest; in “Sagesse,” an American family gets a startling awakening while vacationing on the beaches of Normandy after World War II; the fearsome and tiring demands of matrimony are exposed in “Porn”; “Sweet Peas” exquisitely seizes on one single precious moment that destroys a couple’s budding romance; and in the title story, the eponymous ‘65 Pontiac comes to symbolize the inevitable end of a marriage. Praised for her “skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty . . . and their “unblinking gaze”, Red Car is Sallie Bingham at her masterful best (The New York Times Book Review).
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A woman's obsession drives an affair out of control, violating social contracts and devastating the people in its path. Impressive". -- Library Journal
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