Widowed novelist, near seventy, ex-Park Avenue girl, ex-beatnik, ex-many other things too complicated to list here, loves big parties, summers at the beach, grandchildren, seeks interesting man for dinner and a movie.

Anne Roiphe was not quite seventy years old when her husband of nearly forty years unexpectedly passed away. But it was not until her daughters placed a personal ad in a literary journal that Roiphe began to consider the previously unimagined possibility of a new man. Moving between heartbreaking memories of her marriage and the pressing needs of a new day-to-day routine, Epilogue takes us on her journey into the unknown world of life after love.

Roiphe decides to reenter the dating world. But between new lunches, coffee dates, and e-mail exchanges, she wrestles with an unsettling loneliness. Recollections of marriage evoke complex, unexpected emotions on her journey through grief toward new companionship. In beautifully wrought vignettes, she recalls hailing a cab for the first time and learning to lock and unlock the front door—tasks her husband had always done.

Eloquent and astute, Epilogue tells the story of love rekindled and life remade. Roiphe offers us an elegant literary pastiche not of grief, but of hope and renewal.

As each story unfolds, we find that the matriarchs had to overcome the same devastating obstacles women face today, such as infertility, lust, abandonment, and uncertainty. Roiphe demonstrates how the lives of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah helped to lay the foundation of womanhood in the Western world. Though these women lived many years ago, their lives bear a striking resemblance to our own. They suffered the same pressures and pitfalls, enjoyed the same pleasures and activities, and shared the same responsibilities as today's wives, mothers, and daughters. What is more, they managed to cope with betrayal, death, sacrifice, and jealousy while dealing with the emerging reality of a new faith period.

Little of the drama in the Bible is seen from a woman's perspective. Would Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah share the same point of view as contemporary women? With life having changed so drastically from the days of the Bible, what can we really know about the women who appear in one of our most sacred text? In Water from the Well these questions and many others are addressed in a most enriching fashion, allowing us to discover that women played larger roles in biblical history than many care to acknowledge.

Roiphe opens a window onto the distant past and presents it, through the tales of four remarkable women, to the modern reader with relevant observations and allegories. Combining the deep insight of Bruce Feiler with the narrative skill of Antonia Fraser, Roiphe delivers a fascinating work that deftly brings these four biblical matriarchs into our own age.

In For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor, Roiphe takes us on a glorious tour of the relationships she has had with the great male characters of American fiction: Holden Caulfield, Robert Jordan, Dick Diver, Rabbit, Nathan Zuckerman, Frank Bascombe, and Max and Mickey. In her literary love life Roiphe is a serial monogamist. When she is involved with one character, she is exclusively his until another comes along. She is an audience, an imaginary lover, and a critic, too -- but a critic only in the way a relative carps or chides at the escapades of a dear one. Though a woman, she identifies with her male heroes; as a woman, she feels love, awe, worry, and tenderness toward them at the same time. Never have the great male creations of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Salinger, Roth and Updike, Ford and Sendak come alive so vibrantly through the critical imagination of a fellow novelist.

What we discover on the printed page often carries over to our real-life encounters with the opposite sex, and so Roiphe weaves fragments of her own life story throughout the book. At different times in her life, men like Holden, Rabbit, Nathan, and Frank taught her much of what she knows about how men feel, how they experience love and loss, how they are like and yet unlike her. Piece by piece, Roiphe uncovers a portrait of the male soul, in all its rage and glory.

A personal odyssey as well as a celebration of the joys of reading, For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor is a winning blend of self-discovery, criticism, and autobiography that will inspire everyone in love with the written word.