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,...

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...

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...

"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,...