Willa Cather

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.

Orphaned at the age of 10, Jim Burden moves to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. There he meets Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of an immigrant family from Bohemia, who have come to carve out a life for themselves in the harsh and bountiful Nebraskan landscape....

Inspired by real-life characters and events, Willa Cather’s historical novel follows the committed efforts of two friends, Bishop Jean Marie Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, to establish a diocese in the newly acquired US territory of New Mexico....

To the people of Sweet Water, a fading railroad town on the Western plains, Mrs. Forrester is the resident aristocrat, at once gracious and comfortably remote. To her aging husband, she is a treasure whose value increases as his powers fail....

O Pioneers! is a story of the immigrants who came to America to build new lives for themselves...

Seen through the eyes of a French Catholic missionary, Death Comes for the Archbishop is a tale about the development of the 19th-century American Southwest as the Indians and Spanish deal with each other and the arriving Americans....

The inevitable is understood by each and every one of us who faces the final calling. So too are the effects on those left behind. The memories are there but the empty space, the void can never be refilled. It remains a dark, unreliable pit of loneliness....

When we read or listen, words can have a transforming effect. Our mood can alter in the space of a few sentences from joy to sadness. And not just our mood. These words can affect us physically, they can engage our emotions and even in their sadness bring a lump to our throat....

Mental illness though can still carry a stigma. A case of ‘you’re not trying hard enough’, ‘or knuckling down and getting on with it’. But in more recent decades mental issues have come to be recognised as an illness, a disease rather than an affliction....

Christmas may come but once a year but human emotions, the driving force of our characters, are with us every day....

Christmas may come but once a year but evil, intrigue and malevolence are everyday events. Within this volume Christmas is a time when these dark forces form and coalesce to take life and liberty from people who may and who may not deserve the spin of its wheel....

"On the Gulls' Road" is a touching short story by Willa Cather, first published in McClure's in December 1908. A fellow painter visits the narrator, and is mesmerized by his painting of Alexandra Ebbling, a married woman, whom the narrator met on a ship from Genoa to New York City....

"The Garden Lodge" is a short story by Willa Cather, first published in 1905. It tells the story of a woman asked by her husband if she would agree to tear down their garden lodge and build a new summer house there instead....

In 1851, Father Jean Marie Latour becomes the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. While the area is American by law, it's still Mexican and Indian by custom and belief. During the years that follow, Latour tirelessly but gently spreads his faith while facing external and internal obstacles....

Myra Driscoll e il marito Oswald Henshawe fanno ritorno nella natia Parthia, Illinois. La loro storia d'amore è ancora sulle bocche di tutti...

Uno dei racconti più entusiasmanti del pionierismo femminile, da una maestra del racconto. "Gli anni più belli" di Willa Cather...

Pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1928, questo racconto fu poi raccolto in "Obscure Destinies"...

At the end of the 19th century, fourteen-year-old Ántonia Shimerda has realized the immigrant's dream. She has just arrived in rural Nebraska with her Bohemian (Czech) family at the same time as ten-year-old Jim Burden, an orphan sent to live with his grandparents....

Myra Henshawe gave up her uncle's fortune for love. Having eloped with her husband, they embarked on a journey that can only be deemed as ordinary. As their lives play out, Myra begins to regret the decisions she had made in life, leading their marriage—and her health—to its demise....

Everett’s brother rocked the world with his incredible musical talent. And Everett is…fine. But he’s okay with that. He’s a member of “a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything in particular”....