Colwin is a master of portraying the messiness of life: here, in hilarious and endearing prose, she follows these two improbable pairs, and their families, as they navigate and ultimately find happiness together--not all the time, but for most of it.

With a foreword by Katherine Heiny, author of Early Morning Riser.

As much memoir as cookbook and as much about eating as cooking. --The New York Times Book Review

From the humble hotplate of her one-room apartment to the crowded kitchens of bustling parties, Colwin regales us with tales of meals gone both magnificently well and disastrously wrong. Hilarious, personal, and full of Colwin's hard-won expertise, Home Cooking will speak to the heart of any amateur cook, professional chef, or food lover.

Sheer perfection. --Elin Hilderbrand

To the rest of the world, Polly Solo-Miller Demarest lives acharmed life. She has a beautiful home, a dashing lawyer husband, and two delightful children. But beneath this idyllic surface, the pressure of being the perfect flowerof an illustrious family--and a stable, always-available wife, mother, and daughter--are getting to her. The spark has gone out of her marriage, and to her own surprise, she's having an affair. What follows is at once cathartic and provoking, and both may be necessary states in order for Polly to become the kind of person she wants to be.

With a new foreword by Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen, the triumphant sequel to Home Cooking by a home cook, like you and me, whose charm and lack of pretension make her wonderfully human and a welcome companion as she chatters on about the small culinary accomplishments and discoveries that occur in her kitchen (Chicago Tribune).

Lucky readers in the 1970s and '80s discovered Laurie Colwin's urbane, witty fiction in The New Yorker, as well as her warm, engaging food writing in Gourmet magazine columns. More Home Cooking, the second collection of these columns, is an expression of Colwin's lifelong passion for cuisine and offers a delightful mix of recipes, advice, and personal anecdotes from the kitchen and beyond. She muses over the many charms and challenges of cooking at home in timeless essays including Desserts That Quiver, Real Food for Tots, and Catering on One Dollar a Head.

As informative as it is entertaining, and filled with Colwin's trademark down-to-earth charm and wit, More Home Cooking is a rare treat for anyone who spends time in the kitchen and feels like having a great conversation with someone that you love (Samantha Bee).

Virtually flawless. . . . A tour de force. --Los Angeles Times

Billy and Francis couldn't be more different, at least when it comes to age and disposition, but that doesn't prevent them from falling in love and settling into the easy rhythms of romance--phone calls every morning, rendezvous every weekday afternoon, the odd out-of-town escape--despite both still being very partial to their spouses. In interconnected stories, Laurie Colwin deftly reveals each character's point of view and examines, in razor-sharp detail, the marvelous and messy glory of modern love and the curious desires of the heart.

This whirlwind romance, perfectly captured in Colwinesque frank and funny style, is firm proof that oppositesreally do attract.

Laurie Colwin's beautiful final book, A Big Storm Knocked It Over, is funny and moving and rich with complicated happiness--a love story for anyone who tends to overthink things, a comic novel about trying to find a place in the world. -- Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

In her fifth and final novel, acclaimed author Laurie Colwin explores marriage and friendship, motherhood and careers, as experienced by a cast of delightfully idiosyncratic Manhattanites. At once a hilarious social commentary and an insightful, sophisticated modern romance, A Big Storm Knocked It Over stands as a living tribute to one of contemporary fiction's most original and beloved voices.

In her late thirties, Jane Louise Parker has just married a man whose native decency leaves her almost breathless at her good fortune. After the wedding, she returns to work at a small and tony publishing house whose finances are in disarray. Alongside her best friend, Edie, Jane Louise patiently waits to become pregnant, wondering if a baby will provide a sense of rootedness that still seems to elude her. When that longed-for child arrives, it transforms the Parkers' lives in a way that is as unexpected as it is rapturous.

Seriously good. . . . Deep and rich. -- Los Angeles Times

From the critically acclaimed author of Happy All the Time and Home Cooking, a insightful and witty tale of a woman struggling to overcome her grief and find her future

When Sam Bax, a charming daredevil of a Boston lawyer, sails his boat into a storm off the coast of Maine, Elizabeth Olly Bax, his wife, is widowed at twenty-seven. With no pretense of courage, and a vague dislike for what she feels is the cheap availability of her emotions, Olly grieves the husband she probably would have divorced, while coping with the warmth and awkwardness of family trying (and failing) to distract her from their own grief. As she learns to rethink her life and her love, she becomes close to Sam's brother, Patrick--and begins to realize Sam's recklessness and passion may not be as foreign to her as she thought.

Laurie Colwin depicts Olly--the More Life Widow of the More Life Kid--with humor, compassion, and a decided lack of sentimentality, creating a real heroine who tries to remain true to her heart while keeping her head.

Poignant and hilarious . . . . Irresistible. -- Washington Post

One of the most beloved novels from the critically acclaimed novelist Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving explores a woman's attempts to reconcile her rock-and-roll past with her significantly more sedate family life as a wife and mother.

As a bored graduate student, Geraldine Coleshares is plucked from her too-tame existence when she is invited to tour as the only white backup singer for Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes. The exciting years she spends as a Shakette are a mixed blessing, however, because when she ultimately submits to a conventional life of marriage and children, she finds herself stuck in bittersweet recollections of life on the road. As she grudgingly searches for a path toward happiness that doesn't involve a Day-Glo neon minidress, readers will be enchanted by Geraldine's attempts to grow up, even though she's already an adult.

Employing Colwin's usual dry wit and candor, Goodbye Without Leaving is a classic novel from the writer hailed as ingenious, comic, and spirited by the Boston Globe and a writer of originality and vision by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Laurie Colwin was the best kind of master: human and humorous, full of wisdom and love. --Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of All Adults Here

In these fourteen tales, Laurie Colwin explores love and marriage, friendship and loyalty, and obligation and desire with the compassion and wit that earned her the devotion of legions of readers.

When Passion and Affect was first published in 1974, Colwin was anointed as a young writer to watch. Now, a new generation has the opportunity to encounter some of the most charmingly complicated and beautifully drawn characters in modern fiction: a music critic whose orderly life is threatened by her flirtation with a married cartographer; an ornithologist perplexed by human mating rituals despite his expertise in the natural world; and two young men, best friends and cousins, whose relationship is disrupted by the sudden arrival of Misty Berkowitz in their lives.

Passion and Affect is a dazzling must-have collection from a wise, big hearted writer. A deft and funny one, too. (Washington Post)