"It is difficult to think of any other North American writer who has held up the mirror to the nature of the professional middle classes as exactly and as wittily as Alison Lurie."

—Contemporary Novelists

Winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie is one of America’s most decorated novelists. She has received multiple fellowships from Yaddo, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, and was awarded the 1989 Prix Femina Estranger for The Truth About Lorin Jones. In addition to her fiction, Lurie has achieved great fame as an essayist and children’s writer, with books like Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Why Kids Love the Books They Do and The Language of Clothes. Last year, she returned to novel-writing after a ten-year hiatus with The Last Resort, a book described by The New York Times as "a sparkling, smart new novel" and by The London Telegraph as "a compulsively readable tragi-comedy, full of pathos and wit." Since 1968, Lurie has taught in the English Department at Cornell University.

"On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten A.M. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog. The woman’s name is Virginia Miner: she is fifty-four years old, small, plain, and unmarried—the sort of person that no one ever notices, though she is an Ivy League college professor who has published several books and has a well-established reputation in the expanding field of children’s literature.

The dog that is trailing Vinnie, visible only to her imagination, is her familiar demon or demon familiar, known to her privately as Fido and representing self-pity. She visualizes him as a medium-sized dirty-white long-haired mutt, mainly Welsh terrier: sometimes trailing her silently, at other times whining and panting and nipping at her heels; when bolder, dashing round in circles trying to trip her up, or at least get her to stoop down so that he may rush at her, knock her to the ground, and cover her with sloppy kisses. Vinnie knows very well that Fido wants to get onto the plane with her, but she hopes to leave him behind, as she has successfully done on other trips abroad. Recent events, however, and the projected length of her stay, make this unlikely."

—from Foreign Affairs