San Antonio College Library

Earning a Pulitzer and three Best Play awards for 1994, Edward Albee has, in Three Tall Women, created a masterwork of modern theater. As an imperious, acerbic old woman lies dying, she is tended by two other women and visited by a young man. Albee's frank dialogue about everything from incontinence to infidelity portrays aging without sentimentality. His scenes are charged with wit, pain, and laughter, and his observations tell us about forgiveness,...

Well known for her gentle folk wisdom, the elderly fictional Aunt Jane vividly describes a picturesque and almost vanished way of life in the rural South of the last century. Her words recall lavish Sunday dinners, courtships, quilting bees, church meetings, and county fair competitions. Yet Aunt Jane of Kentucky is more than a collection of reminiscences about the region of Western Kentucky where Eliza Caroline Obenchain (who published under the...

"A magnificently mordant reckoning with mortality by the great British novelist. Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England, which is 'her last love'. She wants to 'see it all before she dies'. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son,...

"Here I am, writing poems in my seventy-ninth and eightieth years, and the reason is partly because I am a foreigner in the land of old age and have tried to learn its language." With these words from the preface of her new, luminous collection, May Sarton takes on the subject of herself in old age. Here are Sarton's observations and reflections, many of which came to her as if by magic during the small hours of the morning. Along with the daily events...

"Since their children left home, Ruth, Dania, and Bess have grown used to living wonderfully free lives. Only now they're beset by children again--this time, their grandchildren. In order to escape, they decide to run away to Greece together for a year. At first, settled on a glorious island, barefoot and contented, they think they've rediscovered the wheel. But then things begin to go awry."-- "Three women in their sixties go off to live in Greece...

"With this novel, Booker Prize-winning author Anita Brookner confirms her reputation as an unparalleled observer of social nuance and deeply felt longings. Brief Lives chronicles an unlikely friendship: that between the flamboyant, monstrously egocentric Julia and the modest, self-effacing Fay, who is at once fascinated and appalled by Julia's excesses. Thrust together by their husbands' business partnership -- and by a guilty secret -- Julia and...

Americans have always had a complicated relationship with aging-- and women have been on the front lines of the battle, willingly or not. Collins illustrates the ways in which age is an arbitrary concept that has swung back and forth over the centuries. From Plymouth Rock to the first female nominee for president, she provides a social history of American women and aging-- and gives women a reason to expect the best from what's to come. -- adapted...

Two elderly widows, Sulia and Louise Hunsenmeir, fight over Ed Tutweiler while Julia's daughter, Nickel, faces her own battles to save the local newspaper from corporate takeover and understand her own sexuality.

An old woman born in 1900 reflects on the joys and sorrows of her long life, commenting on them with wisdom. She is Roxanna Slade, matriarch of a rural family, and her story gives a portrait of the South before the great changes.