How do you sell a house when you have an instinct for places you’ve been happy, a variation on what Italians call the sta casa gene? Furtively, and with considerable angst that will lead,...

Marianna Torgovnick has been called “audacious and wide-ranging” (James E. Young), “brave, enlightening, [and] compassionate” (Joyce Carol Oates), a writer with “verve, lucidity,...