Christina Baker Kline

To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family's remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century.

"Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by luck and chance. This is the story of one such child. As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast...

Feeling stuck in her personal life and career, thirty-three-year-old Angela pursues a seemingly idyllic online relationship with a sailing instructor from Maine, relocates there, and learns important truths about understanding her own heart in finding happiness.

Cassie Simon is a struggling artist living in New York City. When she receives a call from a magistrate telling her she has inherited sixty acres of land in Sweetwater, Tennessee, from her grandfather, whom she never knew, she takes it as a sign: it's time for a change. She moves to the small Southern town where her mother, Ellen, grew up--and where she died tragically when Cassie was three. From the moment she arrives in Sweetwater, Cassie is overwhelmed...

Later he told me that he'd been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn't like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won't stay hidden. To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family's remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in...

"A collection of essays by top literary talents and food writers, Breaking Bread celebrates local foods, family, and community, while exploring how what's on our plates engages with what's off: grief, pleasure, love, ethics, race, and class"--