“The trouble with dying,” a mother says in Anne Tyler’s new novel, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.” “But, Mom,” replies her daughter, “there is no ...

Anne Tyler loves the everyday. With her 20th novel (20th!!!!), A Spool of Blue Thread, Tyler continues to sew together stories about the mundane and turn them into something approaching the magical.

A lopsided pottery house sits on a high shelf in Anne Tyler’s writing room. The handicraft belonged to the novelist’s mother, who made it in her retirement home as her mind was starting to fade. Ms.

The characters in "A Spool of Blue Thread" look like the same Baltimore family members we've socialized with for 50 years in Anne Tyler's fiction. In fact, everything about her new novel — from its ...

Late one July evening in 1994, Red and Abby Whitshank had a phone call from their son Denny. They were getting ready for bed at the time. Abby was standing at the bureau in her slip, drawing hairpins ...

After the success of David Simon’s The Wire, Baltimore became associated — for many television fans at least — with derelict high rises, African American teenagers who seemed perpetually doomed to a ...