Merrill Joan Gerber

Anna in Chains is a collection of stories about the reality of being an elderly woman in the modern world and all the struggles that go with it. Anna Goldman, nearly eighty years old, widowed and living on her own in the Fairfax Area of Los Angeles, struggles to remain independent as she moves through the modern world. Jewish, but disenchanted with religion in any guise, Anna eats bacon to dare God's wrath. Living in a mixed ethnic neighborhood,...

Fifteen stories previously published in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Redbook, and The Sewanee Review, Gerber's work discovers her roots in a background predominantly Jewish. Her female look at daily lives is a nice placement alongside a Philip Roth.

This exceptional book of short stories, chosen for inclusion in the prestigious Illinois Short Fiction Series, contains Gerber's powerful tale "I Don't Believe This," which won an O. Henry Award.

Spanning the continent from Brooklyn and Miami to Pasadena and Berkeley, these stories and the characters who people them are as real as our own lives, and the reader is drawn into the essence of life in all its complexity and wonder.

This is the poignant story of a loving, gentle man, "antique" by virtue, "an antique man" by profession. It is the story of his lingering death, of his transcendent courage, of the agony and solitude of those who must watch - his wife and two daughters. It is everyone's story in that it tells in specific and particular terms the general human experience of love and loss, suffering and death. It is agony redeemed by art. An Antique Man is also an extraordinary...

Old Mother, Little Cat is a highly readable memoir of Gerber's mother's decline in health and how their relationship grew during this time, blended in with Gerber's finding a kitten and her developing relationship with Max (the name she gives the kitten).

Imagine being told before the age of forty that because you have an ovarian cyst, the surgeon wants to take out the "whole kit and caboodle." Imagine being told that "because you already have your children, "who needs all that?" Why not "keep the playground but get rid of the plumbing?" Imagine watching a film strip at the hospital which assures you that though you will no longer have your female organs, you will still have romance in your life and...

A moving, powerful story of women exchanging secrets and sexual advice in an encounter group.

This shattering novel about wife and child abuse is a work of art that haunts the reader's memory. Merrill Joan Gerber reveals the love affair of Ginny and her sensitive but horribly destructive lover, Michael. The pair adopts a child that Michael both loves and abuses.