Lawrence Naumoff Selected Works

The story of an emergency-room physician who likes to save women but loses interest when they become strong. Naumoff focuses on a world where women seem taller than they used to be, men seem to be falling short, and life seems stranger.

Good-hearted Walter is convinced that all women, like his mother and sister, sacrifice their hopes and desires for the men in their lives. An aging bachelor, Walter is still looking for that perfectly pure woman whom he can rescue from the inevitable corruption of men. He thinks he's found her. Many years his junior, Louise is sweet, and more important, innocent. All is bliss in their young marriage, as they live equally and happily in their North Carolina farmhouse. But when Louise's past resurfaces in the form of a sleazy, manipulative ex-boyfriend, will Walter's faith in his new wife survive the shock, or will Louise fall victim to the enduring plan for women? Writing about women and men with brutal, unflinching honesty, Lawrence Naumoff strikes a nerve in this tale of illusory love. A novel about the failure of the sexual revolution, A Plan for Women is "a thoughtful story written in a style both crisp and clever" (Kirkus Reviews).

Richard's married to Caroline, but how long can he endure her constant chatter? When cool, calm Cynthia tempts Richard with sex, money, and peace and quiet, crazy Caroline goes on the warpath.

Rootie Kazootie was a children's television show in the early 1950s. The show was broadcast live from New York City on Saturday mornings. Rootie also appeared in comic books and Little Golden Books during that period. In this novel, the title refers to a character who shares Rootie's personality.

Originally published in 1988, this first novel by Lawrence Naumoff is often called his most recognizably Southern. It follows the lives of a young woman, married to who she believes is a good man, living outside of Chapel Hill, and how she has thought that she has escaped her childhood, and all the things that happened, mostly relating to her father, who lives in a darkly comic world of what he would call 'benign' racism, and a total misunderstanding and obliviousness to his long suffering—also rendered in a darkly comic way—wife. The book moves between humor and the serious business of Sally trying so hard to fix her life. The lives of the daughter, her husband, their parents, and an endearing street girl, all eventually enter the zone of truth and courage and responsibility of the events in their past, and they can then move on.

In the comic novel, The Longest Mobile Home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the main character Jimral Isenhour is the classic, eccentric mountain man, although rather than being like one of the Hatfields and McCoys, he doesn't have a mean bone or thought in his body, just lots and lots of bad luck. If he'd been the Wright Brothers' assistant, all airplanes would have flown only in reverse, or only upside down. His unwilling but polite and loving son, Eli, is regularly recruited by his father to be a part of his inventions and schemes, such as building the longest mobile home "in the world," or at least, in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Acclaimed novelist Lawrence Naumoff's books have not spent much time on the childhood of his characters, but this collection of 11 stories does.

The stories are titled: "A Boy, circa 1954, and the Hero of the War," "The Phantom Empire," "The Fatherland," "The Cashmere Sweater, or, No Jews Allowed, But It's Okay, Right?" "The Russian Ring," "Leslie and the Man from the Camps," "Kind of a Zip A Dee Do Dah, But Not So Much," "Fascinating Rhythm," "The Boy Who Forgot How to Talk," "Man Time, 1960," and"The Experimental Boy."

In the collection The Beautiful Couple and Other Stories, acclaimed novelist Lawrence Naumoff begins with a long story about a happily artsy, somewhat bohemian styled couple in Chapel Hill, who are, as students, mythologized by their friends as the "beautiful couple" everyone wants to be like. After graduation, they go to Mexico, to the Pacific coast, and stay in a house overlooking the ocean with a famous writer and his two women. Eventually they return to Chapel Hill, and the story follows them in the decade from the late sixties to the late seventies.

Other stories include a Hemingway spoof titled "Men Like White Elephants," as well as "Tex Gets Married in Arkansas," "Fascinating Rhythm, circa 1953," "Revolutionaries," "Peruvian Goddess Crab Cakes," and, "Taking Your Girl Friend Home to Meet Your Family and She's Pregnant and It's 1973 and She's Methodist and You're Definitely Not and Your Mother Will Cry."