The definitive anthology of wisdom and wit about one of life’s most complex, intriguing, and personal subjects. When and whom do you marry? How do you keep a spouse content? Do all engaged couples get cold feet? How cold is so cold that you should pivot and flee? Where and how do children fit in? Is infidelity always wrong? In this volume, you won’t find a single answer to your questions about marriage; you will find hundreds. Spanning centuries and cultures, sources and genres, The Marriage Book offers entries from ancient history and modern politics, poetry and pamphlets, plays and songs, newspaper ads and postcards. It is an A to Z compendium, exploring topics from Adam and Eve to Anniversaries, Fidelity to Freedom, Separations to Sex. In this volume, you’ll hear from novelists, clergymen, sex experts, and presidents, with guest appearances by the likes of Liz and Dick, Ralph and Alice, Louis CK, and Neil Patrick Harris. Casanova calls marriage the tomb of love, and Stephen King calls it his greatest accomplishment. With humor, perspective, breadth, and warmth, The Marriage Book is sure to become a classic.

The New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, sorrow and love. • "A beautiful book by a writer of rare talent.”— Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of WILD Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time—abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning—a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become. What are the forces that shape our most elemental bonds? How do we make lifelong commitments in the face of identities that are continuously shifting, and commit ourselves for all time when the self is so often in flux? What happens to love in the face of the unexpected, in the face of disappointment and compromise—how do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, desire what we have rather than what we lack? Drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, Shapiro writes gloriously of the joys and challenges of matrimonial life, in a luminous narrative that unfurls with urgent immediacy and sharp intelligence. Artful, intensely emotional work from one of our finest writers.

"Whether she's finding herself or finding a sitter, contemplating her sex life as she rubs hormone night cream on her face, or wrestling with the contradiction of falling in love with a man her parents would actually approve of, Viorst transforms the familiar events of daily life into poems that make you laugh with recognition. Here is the young single girl leaving her parents' home for life in the big city ("No I do not believe in free love/And yes I will be home for Sunday dinners"). Here is the aspiring bohemian with an expensive liberal arts education, getting coffee and taking dictation, "Hoping that someday someone will be impressed/With all I know." Here is that married woman, coping with motherhood ("The tricycles are cluttering my foyer/The Pop Tart crumbs are sprinkled on my soul") and fantasy affairs ("I could imagine cryptic conversations, clandestine martinis...and me explaining that long kisses clog my sinuses") and all-too-real family reunions ("Four aunts in pain taking pills/One cousin in analysis taking notes"). And here she is at mid-life, wondering whether a woman who used to wear a "Ban the Bomb" button can find happiness being a person with a set of fondue forks, a fish poacher, and a wok. Every step of the way, It's Hard to be Hip Over Thirty and Other Tragedies of Married Life demonstrates once and for all that no one understands American women coming of age like Judith Viorst." -- Amazon.com.

" A Courtship After Marriage places sex and marriage at the heart of modernity's making. Hirsch's innovative study of marriage-making in transnational Mexican families offers a fascinating look at the opportunities cross-border migration provides for reconstructing gender and rediscovering pleasure. This ambitious, well-crafted book speaks to anthropologists, demographers, and public health specialists, while transcending the divides between them."—Susan Greenhalgh, author of Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain "Jennifer Hirsch is one of the new wave in demographic scholars that takes culture seriously. Her book is a model of engaged, policy-relevant scholarship that achieves its warrant through deep contextualization in the everyday experience of its subjects. Beautifully written, rigorously analyzed, and almost novelistic in its nuance and detail, this study of marriage, migration, and fertility puts the people back into demography and makes one of the most powerful contributions to policy-relevant social science that I have seen in a long time. A work of beauty, sensitivity, and scholarship that sets a new standard for all that follows."—Tom Fricke, author of Himalayan Households: Tamang Demography and Domestic Processes "In this engagingly written and keenly observed ethnography of Mexican marriages in Atlanta and in small Mexican towns, Jennifer Hirsch brings love, sex and romance to Mexican immigration scholarship, and presents a compelling case for the rise of companionate marriages and ideals of spousal intimacy. This book will appeal to anyone interested in gender studies, immigrant families and the social and cultural contexts of fertility."—Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Domestica: Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence "A groundbreaking study. Gracefully written, yet at the same time rigorously argued, this book reminds us of the poetry and dignity that can be found in ordinary lives and of the dreams and aspirations that sustain human agency even in the face of severe social and economic constraints. This is a major contribution to our understanding of migration, gender, sexuality, and social change in contemporary life and a model for engaged social research at its very best."—Richard Parker, author of Bodies, Pleasures and Passions "Hirsch has written a superb, insightful, and original study of Mexican migrants and the challenges of marital devotion and separation they face across time and space. Exemplary in its detail and rigor, Courtship brings us into the lives of men and women in Georgia and Jalisco, shows us the risks they take to create modern forms of intimacy, and reconceptualizes how we should view sexualized companionship, procreation, and engendered pleasures. This book will become a gold standard ethnography in medical anthropology, public health, and transnational migration studies."—Matthew C. Gutmann, author of The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico "Hirsch’s engaging analysis of gender relations among immigrant Mexicans in Atlanta and in the Mexican community from which they come, shows how migration affects women's and men's roles, the place of sexuality in building marital intimacy, struggles over contraceptive use, and power relations in the couple. Using detailed ethnographic examples, she examines the trend toward companionate couplehood, and demonstrates both struggles and triumphs as young Mexicans and Mexican-Americans strive to create marriages that combine the strengths of traditional respect-based bonds with the advantages of new relationships built on trust."—L.A. Rebhun, author of The Heart Is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil

A tender work of mourning, this poetry collection—owing to the remembered words of a much-loved husband—recalls the author’s life before marriage and considers a future after her husband’s death. Imagining that future, she confronts the myths of an afterlife, a belief in God, her debts to other poets, and her dependence on friends and children. At the center of these beautiful lyrics—written with complete control of rhythm and tone—it is a man, rather than grief, that appears clearly.