Ellen Akins Selected Works

Joey Taylor's childhood went awry somewhere. Now that she's alone, fourteen years old, her father dead, her mother gone adventuring, she sees the opportunity to bring herself up right. But just as she's starting, Joey meets David Giffard, an eccentric loner whose mysterious habits draw her into his own strange and solitary life. Giffard gives her piano lessons and then begins to show her bits and pieces of a film that seems to hold a lesson, too, if she could just make sense of it. When at last she has to learn the secret of this odd home movie, Joey sets off for Los Angeles to find the actor whose role in the film is somehow crucial to Giffard's story—and, now, to her own. Along the way her path crosses those of a male stripper who wants no trouble, a dancer who wants to disappear, a philosophical truck driver who wants to settle down, and finally the hapless actor who bitterly wants out of the movie of Giffard's life. Joey's search involves them all in a story where certain knowledge surprises, recognition looks strange, and the only way to come home is to keep moving.

From a writer whose work Robert Coover has described as "subtle, wise, intricate, innovative," a rich novel of family rivalries, corporate maneuvers, and sexual intrigue—set in a small Wisconsin beer town. In the background: a small family-run brewery, Gutenbier, whose backward business practices have been miraculously transformed into an asset by the new vogue for microbreweries and designer beverages. At the center: two women whose world is the brewery. Melissa Johnson is the heiress to Gutenbier, and Alice Reinhart works there. On her father's death, Melissa inherits the chairmanship everyone expected to go to her brother and finds herself resented by both workers and management. Alice, returning from New York and a bad marriage, takes up her job in the brewery only to discover that an indiscretion she committed at seventeen has surfaced and has made her the object of a series of seemingly innocent pranks that slowly reveal a darker intent. As these two women fight the forces arrayed against them and the novel moves toward its climax, the business, the politics—the life—of a town are compellingly portrayed.

Beauty Skinner is, as she herself admits, a woman to whom small men have never been indifferent, that most unfortunate of females, a “big girl.” Beauty is fated to be the subject of unbelieving stares, to stop conversations, and to realize with every lumbering step that towering ungainliness is the inescapable fact of her life. But in Ellen Akins’s fierce comedy Little Woman, escape is precisely what Beauty manages. After almost accidentally killing her twin sons (the product of a peculiar marriage into which she has stumbled), Beauty decides to head for greener pastures alone. Her cunning plan: to set up a rural shelter where needy women can be rehabilitated, a shelter that is designed to fail quickly, leaving Beauty a cozy retreat of her own. Her willing tool: the guileless philanthropist-heiress Clara Bow Cole, who is all too pleased to apply her wealth to this altruistic adventure. A plot of land and a house are secured, a group of down-and-out women is solicited, and Clara Bow and Beauty depart for the wilds of Wisconsin to await their charges. What arrives, however, are hardly the wretched souls that Beauty has anticipated. Molly, Kathy, Gigi, Lynn, Cathy, Elizabeth, Cora, Joan, Barbie, and Mary Belinda are, in fact, a ferocious and intractable crew. Thieves, drunkards, and runaways, they greet their new life with a raunchy stubbornness that leaves Beauty nonplussed as she becomes determined to make her bogus venture work. She insists that her diffident charges eke an existence out of the wilderness, a task that turns their colony into something like Robinson Crusoe’s island in a bad year, and its occupants a distaff counterpart of Lord of the Flies. While its heroines’ battles to survive nature—and one another—have hilarious (and ultimately tragic) consequences, Little Woman takes an unsparing look at the struggle to form families and communities, and how people’s need for control renders any sort of bond between them suspicious.

Recruited to market Governor John Anderson in his bid for the presidency and then hired as an advisor when he wins, former filmmaker Ann Matter becomes involved in scandals involving his administration.