Quindlen, Anna

A family finds a way to preserve the feeling of Christmas into the new year by filling a basket with the pine needles from the Christmas tree.

The life choices of a mother and daughter are reassessed as the mother lies dying of cancer.

A fictional narrative in which Fran Benedetto, a woman who was abused by her husband, examines the reasons why she stayed in her marriage for so long, and ponders whether leaving was the right thing to do.

Meghan Fitzmaurice, host of a top-rated morning television show, finds her perfect life threatened when she makes an on-air comment that has a devastating impact on Meghan, her husband, and Bridget, Meghan's social worker sister.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.

A fictional narrative in which Fran Benedetto, a woman who was abused by her husband, examines the reasons why she stayed in her marriage for so long, and ponders whether leaving was the right thing to do.

Anna Quindlen first visited London from a chair in her suburban Philadelphia home?in one of her beloved childhood mystery novels. She has been back to London countless times since, through the pages of books and in person, and now, in Imagined London, she takes her own readers on a tour of this greatest of literary cities. In Imagined London, Quindlen walks through the city, moving within blocks from the great books of the 19th century to the detective novels of the 20th to the new modernist tradition of the 21st. With wit and charm, Imagined London gives this splendid city its full due in the landscape of the literary imagination.

A fictional narrative in which Fran Benedetto, a woman who was abused by her husband, examines the reasons why she stayed in her marriage for so long, and ponders whether leaving was the right thing to do.

An essay in which Anna Quindlen discusses the trap of being perfect and urges people to lay down the burden of trying to achieve perfection and find their authentic selves.