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 ...

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.

“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

What makes it so good? Its subject is her most recognizable and essential one, family, its setting again Baltimore, its story told in her customarily sweet, wistful, comic voice. In other words, A ...

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 ...

There’s a reason why Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist) is one of America’s most-read authors. She combines emotional complexity with wholly relatable material in observational ...

After the success of David Simon’s The Wire, Baltimore became associated — for many television fans at least — with derelict high rises, African American teenagers who seemed perpetually doomed to a ...