New Releases by Pauline Nestor

Whether you’re aiming for a New York Times bestseller or a short personal essay to share with family and friends, a popular blogger and memoirist shows you the way in this witty writing guide and disarmingly candid account of discovering her own voice. Whether you’re aiming for a New York Times bestseller or a short personal essay to share with family and friends, a popular blogger and memoirist shows you the way in this witty writing guide and disarmingly candid account of discovering her own voice. “Theo Nestor is a writer who, I am positive, will be heard from,” wrote Pulitzer Prize–winning author Frank McCourt, and hear from her we do in this enthralling memoir that doubles as a witty and richly told writing guide. Yet the real promise in Writing Is My Drink lies in Nestor’s uncanny ability as a storyteller and teacher to make sure we’ll also hear from you, the reader. Brimming with stories from her own writing life, and paired with practical “Try This” sections designed to challenge and inspire, this disarmingly candid account of a writer’s search for her voice delivers charming, wise, and often hilarious guidance that will motivate writers at every stage of their careers.

“I feel like I’ve joined an enormous club, something like the Veterans of Foreign Wars. We are weary with battle fatigue and sometimes even gripped by nostalgia for the good old, bad old days, but our numbers are large,” writes Theo Pauline Nestor in this wry, fiercely honest chronicle of life after divorce. Less than an hour after confronting her husband over his massive gambling losses, Theo banishes him from their home forever. With two young daughters to support and her life as a stay-at-home mother at an abrupt end, Nestor finds herself slipping from “middle-class grace” as she attends a court-ordered custody class, stumbles through job interviews, and–much to her surprise–falls in love once again. As Theo rebuilds her life and recovers her sense of self, she’s forced to confront her own family’s legacy of divorce. “I’m from a long line of stock market speculators, artists of unmarketable talents, and alcoholics,” writes Nestor. “The higher, harder road is not our road. We move, we divorce, we drink, or we disappear.” Nestor’s journey takes her deep into her family’s past, to a tiny village in Mexico, where she discovers the truth about how her sister ended up living in a convent there after their parents divorced in the early sixties. What she learns ultimately brings her closer to understanding her own divorce and its impact on her two daughters. “I knew from experience that for children divorce means half the world is constantly eclipsed. When you’re with one parent, the other must always slip out of view,” Nestor writes. Funny, openhearted, and brave, How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed will speak to anyone who has passed through the halls of divorce court or risked tenderness after loss. It marks the debut of an enchanting, deeply truthful voice.

George Eliot was one of the great thinkers of her time, a figure central to the main currents of thought and belief in the nineteenth century. Yet when this distinguished public intellectual turned to fiction writing at the age of thirty-six, she regarded it not as a lesser pursuit, but as the distillation of all of her knowledge and ideas. For Eliot, fiction enabled the consideration of life ''in its highest complexity'', and had the capacity not merely to elicit, but actually to create, moral sentiment by surprising readers into the recognition of realities other than their own. In this new study, Pauline Nestor offers a challenging reassessment of Eliot''s contribution to the critical debates, both of her age and of her own era. In particular, she examines the author''s literary expolration of ethics, especially in relation to the negotiation of difference. Nestor argues compellingly that, through a reading of their sophisticated drama of otherness, Eliot''s novels can be seen as freshly relevant to contemporary theoretical debates in feminism, moral philosophy, post-colonial studies and psychoanalysis. Covering the writer''s complete body of major fiction, this is an indispensable voume for anyone studying the work of one of the most important and influential novelists of the nineteenth century.

How did 19th-century female writers portray relationships amongst women? How were female friendships and communities reflected in the mirror of women''s texts? Exploring this subject through the work of three major women novelists-Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot-Nestor examines their writings, thier lives, and their attitudes towards and relationships with women in the context of 19th-century social history. The period between 1840 and 1890 saw great changes in thinking about women in society. This social phenomenon coincided with the literary phenomenon of an emergent community of women authors. As a result, for the first time women had the advantage of "telling their own stories" in print, thus making a substantial contribution to the general public debate.