Works by
Mary Morris
(Writer)

Biography/Memoirs

• Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone (1987)
  Traveling from the highland desert of northern Mexico to the steaming jungles of Honduras, from the seashore of the Caribbean to the exquisite highlands of Guatemala, Mary Morris, a celebrated writer of both fiction and nonfiction, confronts the realities of place, poverty, machismo, and selfhood. As she experiences the rawness and precariousness of life in another culture, Morris begins to hear echoes of her own life and her own sense of deprivation. And she begins, too, to overcome the struggles of the past that have held her back personally; as in the very best travel writing, Morris effectively explores her own soul while exploring new terrain and new experience. By crossing such boundaries throughout the pages of Nothing to Declare, she sets new frontiers for herself as a woman-and as a writer.

Fiction

• The River Queen (2007)
  This story of a middle-aged woman's odyssey down the Mississippi River is a funny, beautifully written, and poignant tale of a journey that transforms a life. In fall 2005 acclaimed travel writer Mary Morris set off down the Mississippi in a battered old houseboat called the River Queen, with two river rats named Tom and Jerry-and a rat terrier, named Samantha Jean, who hated her. It was a time of emotional turmoil for Morris. Her father had just died; her daughter was leaving home; life was changing all around her. It was then she decided to return to the Midwest where she was from, to the river she remembered, where her father had played jazz piano in tiny towns. Morris describes living like a pirate and surviving a tornado. Because of Katrina, oil prices, and drought, the river was often empty-a ghost river-and Morris experienced it as Joliet and Marquette had four hundred years earlier. As she learned to pilot her beloved River Queen without running aground and made peace with Samantha Jean, Morris got her groove back, reconnecting to her past. More important, she came away with her best book, a bittersweet travel tale told in the very real voice of a smart, sad, funny, gutsy, and absolutely appealing woman.

• Revenge (2004)
  A mesmerizing novel of psychological intrigue written by a consummate storyteller at the height of her powers. Revenge is a riveting and psychologically complex novel of two women connected by their neighborhood, their work, and their dark stories. Andrea Geller is a young painter trapped in an obsession---a belief that her stepmother caused her father's death. Loretta Partlow is an aging, blocked world-class novelist in search of a story. As these two women spin a web that entangles them both, the novel takes us through narrative twists and turns. Revenge is part thriller, part literary tale about how stories are made and told and appropriated from other people's lives.

• Acts of God (2000)
  When Tess Winterstone returns to her suburban childhood home after almost 30 years to attend a high school reunion, memories flood back, firmly shut doors open, and the betrayal by her father decades earlier comes to rest. Masterfully weaving the complexities of familial love and rosy 1950s suburban life with the dark underside of such a reality, Mary Morris moving portrays a woman coming to terms with her past and, ultimately, herself.

• House Arrest (1996)
  Mary Morris, called "a marvelous storyteller" by The Chicago Tribune, returns with the finest novel in her acclaimed career--a vividly etched, engrossing story of a nation, two remarkable women, and the meaning of freedom.Taut with tension, filled with the telling observations of place and local character that grow out of her expertise as a travel writer, House Arrest is Mary Morris's richest, most powerful novel to date.

• The Night Sky (1993)
  The Night Sky is a moving novel about the solitary moral courage of a women raising a child alone and the complex resilience of family. Ivy Slovak is a jewelry designer and artist whose days are absorbed by the struggle to make an unreliable paycheck cover the needs of her infant son. Hungry for the freedom of the world outside her window, Ivy is haunted by the memory of her mother, who abandoned her when she was seven years old. She recalls the years spent with her loving but itinerant father, wandering the desert, hoping somehow to find the troubled, beautiful woman who had left them both. With quiet eloquence and deep compassion, The Night Sky establishes Morris as one of contemporary American literature's foremost chroniclers of the secrets and strengths of the human spirit.

• The Waiting Room(1989)

• Crossroads (1982)

Non-fiction

• The Illustrated Virago Book of Women Travellers (2003), Larry O'Connor and Mary Morris, eds.
  In this newly illustrated edition, 300 years of wanderlust are captured as women travel the world for pleasure and peril. Among the extraordinary women whose writing is included here are Edith Wharton, Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, Mary McCarthy, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rose Macaulay, and Vita Sackville-West. Whether it is curiosity about the world, a thirst for adventure, or escape from personal tragedy, all these women are united in approaching their journeys with wit, intelligence, and compassion for those encountered along the way.

• Angels and Aliens: A California Journey (1999)
  In Angels & Aliens, Mary Morris once again sets out on the road, this time as a single parent, wandering with her baby daughter through Southern California. Posing as a believer, Morris infiltrates New Age groups, flies as an angel through the Crystal Cathedral, and becomes a member of the earth-based unit of the Ashtar command. Combining her gift as a story teller, which is apparent in her fiction, and the powerful sense of place she brings to her nonfiction, Morris gives us a traveler's tale for the millennium when there's no place to go but up.

• Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin (1991)

Short Stories

• The Lifeguard: Stories (l997)
  The Lifeguard combines Mary Morris's consummate craft as a storyteller with her gift for dramatic travel writing. In the title story, a teenage lifeguard sees his mystique among the girls on the beach dissolve in a panicked moment when he cannot save a child. In "The Glass-Bottom Boat," a mother on her first trip abroad learns about trust from a solicitous stranger.The Lifeguard is a powerful collection of ten short stories that shows Morris's great sensitivity to men and women at moments of turbulence, uncertainty, and crisis.

• The Bus of Dreams (1985)

• Vanishing Animals & Other Stories (1979) -- Winner the Rome Prize

Other

• Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers: An Anthology (1993), Mary Morris, ed.