NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - Is love between equals possible? This modern classic is a delightful intellectual love story that explores the deepest canyons of romantic love even as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want.

Luminous . . . Few books evoke the state of love at its apogee. --The New York Times Book Review

The best rendering of erotic politics . . . since D.H. Lawrence. . . . The voice of Rush's narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.--The New York Review of Books

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a compelling waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari--one in which he is virtually the only man.

What ensues is an exhilarating quest and an exuberant comedy of manners: A dryly comic love story about grown-up people who take the life of the mind seriously. --Newsweek

A collection of short stories from the National Book Award-winning author of Mating - Powerful and original...always convincingly authentic. The ironies keep cutting in new directions. --The New York Times

Whether they are Americans, Brits, or a stubborn and suicidally moral Dutchman, Norman Rush's whites are not sure why they are in Botswana. Their uncertainty makes them do odd things.

Driven half-mad by the barking of his neighbor's dogs, Carl dips timidly into native witchcraft--only to jump back out at the worst possible moment. Ione briskly pursues a career as a seducer (A seductress was merely someone who was seductive and who might or might not be awarded a victory. But a seducer was a professional), while her dentist husband fends off the generous advances of an African cook.

Funny, sad, and deeply knowing, polished throughout to a diamond glitter, Whites is a magnificent collection of stories.

At once a political adventure, a portrait of a passionate but imperiled marriage, and an acrobatic novel of ideas from the National Book Award-winning author of Mating.

An astonishing accomplishment . . . [A] detonation of talent that threatens to incinerate competitors for miles around. --The Christian Science Monitor

Mortals marks Norman Rush's return to the territory he has made his own, the southern African nation of Botswana. Nobody here is entirely what he claims to be. Ray Finch is not just a middle-aged Milton scholar but a CIA agent. His lovely and doted-upon wife Iris is also a possible adulteress. And Davis Morel, the black alternative physician who is treating her--while undertaking a quixotic campaign to de-Christianize Africa--may also be her lover.

As a spy, the compulsively literate Ray ought to have no trouble confirming his suspicions. But there's the distraction of actual spying. Most of all, there's the problem of love, which Norman Rush anatomizes in all its hopeless splendor in a novel that would have delighted Milton, Nabokov, and Graham Greene.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - National Book Award-winning author of Mating - In a sophisticated romp through the tribulations and joys of marriage and friendship, a group of college friends reunites two decades after graduation.

Rush is the best kind of comic novelist. --The New York Times Book Review

After the sudden death of Douglas, once the ringleader of a clique of self-styled wits, his four best friends are summoned to his Catskills estate to mourn his passing. Responding to a mysterious sense of emergency in the call, Ned flies in from San Francisco with his wife Nina in furious pursuit; they're at a critical point in their attempts to conceive and she won't let a funeral get in the way. It is Nina who gives us a pointed, irreverent commentary as the men reconvene, while Ned tries to understand what it was that made this clutch of souls his friends to begin with--before time, sex, work, and the brutal quirks of history reshaped them.

Filled with unexpected, funny, telling aperçus, Norman Rush's Subtle Bodies is also a deeply moving exploration of the meanings of life.

When Douglas, the ringleader of a clique of self-styled wits of superior sensibility dies suddenly, his four remaining friends are summoned to his estate high in the Catskills to memorialize his life and mourn his passing. Responding to an obscure sense of emergency in the call, Ned, our hero, flies in from San Francisco pursued instantly by his furious wife, Nina: they're at a critical point in their attempt to get Nina pregnant, and she's ovulating