Katherine Taylor

Ingrid Palamede never returns to the places she's lived. For her, "whole neighborhoods, whole cities, can be ruined by the reasons you left." But when a breakup leaves her heartbroken and homeless, she's forced to return to her childhood home of Fresno, California. Back in the real wine country, where grapes are grown for mass producers, Ingrid must confront her aging parents and their financial woes, soured friendships, and the blissfully bad decisions she made in her past. But along the way, she unearths her love for the land, her talent for harvesting grapes, and a deep fondness for and forgiveness of the very first place she ever left. "An elegant, restrained stylist" (The New York Times Book Review), Katherine Taylor turns her keen eye to high-class, small-town life among the grapes--on the vine, or soaked in vodka--in this blisteringly funny, ferociously intelligent, and deeply moving novel of self-discovery.

In the world of Kate Taylor, heroine of Rules for Saying Goodbye, pleasure and melancholy are close neighbors--like the summer hats and lobster boilers squashed together in the tiny closet of her Manhattan apartment. In this hilarious, bittersweet story, we follow young Kate from her girlhood in Fresno California, through a career at a chilly New England prep school, and on to life in Manhattan, where she finds a sometimes dissipated, sometimes glamorous life of fourteen-dollar cocktails, empty cupboards, and extravagantly unsuitable men. In this witty and affecting debut, the real-life Katherine Taylor chronicles the moment when you stop waiting for things to happen, and go in search of them yourself.

"Looking to learn", an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, challenges the decontextualized approach to images and learning by setting ritual, functional and intentionally aesthetic objects side by side, together with inventories, technical viewing devices, photographs of ceremonial practices deploying the objects, printed materials representing them, and records and fragments of some of the environments to which they have belonged. The resulting installations probed the ways in which objects, artifacts and images have been collected, deployed and exhibited in teaching, research and self-representation from the earliest days at the University.