Dinner & A Book - The Falls
Local Productions
- Dinner & a Book
- Economic Outlook
- Education Counts
- Experience Michiana
- Outdoor Elements
- Politically Speaking
- Raising of America
- Women in Leadership
- Beyond Bridges
- Joey D's Kitchen
- Our Town Series
- Legends Of Michiana
- Other Productions
Featured Productions
PBS Kids
State & National
- '70s Soul Superstars (My Music)
- America's Heartland
- America's Test Kitchen
- American Black Journal
- American Experience
- Antiques Roadshow
- As Time Goes By
- Austin City Limits
- Baking With Julia
- Best of Sewing With Nancy
- Body Electric
- Burt Wolf: Travels & Traditions
- Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Television
- Ciao Italia
- Civilizations
- Classic Gospel
- Classical Stretch: By Essentrics
- Consuelo Mack WealthTrack
- Curious Crew
- Dinosaur Train: Nature Trackers Adventure Camp
- Ecosense for Living
- Education Counts Michiana
- Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South
- Firing Line With Margaret Hoover
- Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting
- Frontline
- Functional Fitness With Suzanne Andrews
- Garden Smart
- Great Performances
- History Detectives
- Independent Lens
- Indiana Week in Review
- Inside Indiana Business
- Justice in Chester
- Kid Stew
- Live From Notre Dame
- Michigan Out of Doors
- My Greek Table With Diane Kochilas
- Native Report
- NHK Newsline
- NOVA
- Off the Record
- Overheard With Evan Smith
- Paint This With Jerry Yarnell
- Painting and Travel With Roger & Sarah Bansemer
- Painting With Wilson Bickford
- Poetry in America
- Quilting Arts
- Rick Steves' Europe
- Rick Steves' Festive Europe
- Samantha Brown's Places to Love
- Seeing Canada
- Sit and Be Fit
- Song of the Mountains
- Songs at the Center
- Steven Raichlen's Project Fire
- The American Woodshop
- The Best of the Joy of Painting
- The Big Band Years (My Music Presents)
- The Kate
- The Lawrence Welk Show
- The Mystery of Chaco Canyon
- The Whitney Reynolds Show
- This American Land
- This Land Is Your Land (My Music Presents)
- This Old House
- To the Contrary With Bonnie Erbé
- Under the Radar Michigan
- Wai Lana Yoga
- Weekends With Yankee
- Woodsmith Shop
- Woodsongs
- Yoga in Practice
A stunning, major achievement from Joyce Carol Oates, "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation). A haunting story of the powerful spell Niagara Falls casts upon two generations of a family, leading to tragedy, love, loss, and, ultimately, redemption. A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls. A newlywed, he has left behind his wife, Ariah Erskine, in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. "The Widow Bride of The Falls," as Ariah comes to be known, begins a relentless, seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side throughout, confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby is unexpectedly transfixed by the strange, otherworldly gaze of this plain, strange woman, falling in love with her though they barely exchange a word. What follows is their passionate love affair, marriage, and children -- a seemingly perfect existence.
But the tragedy by which their life together began shadows them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder. What unfurls is a drama of parents and their children; of secrets and sins; of lawsuits, murder, and, eventually, redemption. As Ariah's children learn that their past is enmeshed with a hushed-up scandal involving radioactive waste, they must confront not only their personal history but America's murky past: the despoiling of the landscape, and the corruption and greed of the massive industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s. Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid-twentieth century. As in We Were the Mulvaneys, a "darkly engrossing novel" (Washington Post Book World), she examines what happens when the richly interwoven relationships of parents and their children are challenged by circumstances outside the family. The Falls is a love story gone wrong and righted, and it alone places Joyce Carol Oates definitively in the company of the great American novelists.