Picture a middle-class American family, four generations, living in the suburbs. The “founder” is an upstart with a murky past, a hard-working construction guy in a bleak marriage. Next in line are ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

Anne Tyler loves the everyday. With her 20th novel (20th!!!!), A Spool of Blue Thread, Tyler continues to sew together stories about the mundane and turn them into something approaching the magical.

Late one July evening in 1994, Red and Abby Whitshank had a phone call from their son Denny. They were getting ready for bed at the time. Abby was standing at the bureau in her slip, drawing hairpins ...

The characters in "A Spool of Blue Thread" look like the same Baltimore family members we've socialized with for 50 years in Anne Tyler's fiction. In fact, everything about her new novel — from its ...

“The trouble with dying,” a mother says in Anne Tyler’s new novel, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.” “But, Mom,” replies her daughter, “there is no ...

A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler (Knopf). This airy saga examines three generations of a Baltimore family. In warm, lucid prose, Tyler skips back and forth through the twentieth century to depict ...

Anne Tyler’s novels tend to walk a narrow line between the moving and the sentimental, the sympathetic and the maudlin, the evocative and the banal. Her best work — like “The Accidental Tourist,” ...

Anne Tyler’s Booker short-listed A Spool of Blue Thread is an exquisite meditation on family life. It spans across several generations, taking in one family’s secrets and losses, its changes and ...

RFK Jr. says JFK Jr. confided in him about fighting with Caroline over Jackie’s estate: 'It’s like a divorce' This website uses tracking technologies to enable our website functionalities, to enhance ...